


The Dark One

by BrooklynBugleBoy



Category: Bohemian Rhapsody (Movie 2018), Queen (Band)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Bonding, Brother Raising Sister, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Drowning, F/M, Fractured Fairy Tale, Half-Human, Humans, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Irish Mythology - Freeform, M/M, Magic, Mermaids, Multi, Murder, Past Abuse, Pollution - Freeform, Revenge, Scary Merfolk, Science, Selkies, Sirens, Songs, Tails, Trans Character, True Love, merrows, puke, swimming in the Thames
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-01-05 11:20:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 21,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18364970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrooklynBugleBoy/pseuds/BrooklynBugleBoy
Summary: "One in a generation, the Coneellys spit out a Dark One...The Coneellys came to Roan Inish when there was only Irish spoken on the islands, they built their meager homes on the beach, and the seals and birds moved aside to make room for them. There's only a few families and they're all related, so when it came time to find a mate, it was elsewhere you had to look. There was a boy among them, Liam, who liked to be alone, he set his own traps... and sat alone at all the all the family gatherings.Then one day, he was walking along the beaches and saw a thing he could scarce believe...Liam had seen a selkie.... and he had never seen a woman so lovely in all his life."-The Secret of Roan InishJohn Deacon is a little less than human. And so is his baby sister, the infant he was left with when his mother went back home to the sea.But everyone has their secrets don't they?Sometimes those secrets can be more ancient than the abandoned rocky skerries of Ireland and the bloated lancet skies above.





	1. My Jolly Sailor Bold

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, no explanation for this teeny tiny thing. It was in my trash folder and @UniversesVisiting said it looked cool so I gave it a little CPR. :) Here's for you bb, I guess. 
> 
> Songs are Dulaman from Song Of The Sea, My Jolly Sailor Bold from Pirates of the Caribbean. <3333
> 
> Tell me if you'd like more of this mess I guess?

  _“Upon one summer's morning_  
_I carefully did stray_  
_Down by the Walls of Wapping_  
_Where I met a sailor gay_  
_Conversing with a young lass_  
_Who seem'd to be in pain_  
_Saying, William, when you go_

_I fear you'll ne'er return again…”_

 

  
It was his baby sister Julie's shrill and almost pitiful cries that woke John in the middle of the night. 

He groaned and buried his round and lightly freckled face once more in the sweaty-salty sheets, those that covered the great majority of his damp twin mattress.

But eventually, he did sigh and lift his face, using one small hand to scrounge about the floor blind, trying to find something to cover himself with. He settled on a pair of dirty boxer shorts that had likely seen better days, smelling of surf and sea, and yanked them on single-handedly. Staggering out to find the toddler's crib in the darkness. He was all that she had left, if he didn’t come to her cries, no one else would.

"Oh hello,  _a leanbh_." 

He instinctively slipped into the Irish-Gaelic of his birth, as his sleepless brain wasn't exactly working on all cylinders. _His child_ , he pressed a gentle kiss to the soft curls damp against the crown of her head. Checking for a fever almost naturally by this point. She was fine. 

"Not sick then are we? Just a fussy little mite." 

He sighed and settled back against the threadbare sofa, her little red head pillowed against his jutting collarbone. Spit bubbles and snot making his skin sticky where she nestled into it, but he was far more than used to the sensation. ”How's about we get you sleeping, eh?” He'd bottle-fed her himself on fatty seal's milk as a newborn.

He yawned, scrubbing at his tired eyes with his free hand. Trying to dredge up a lullaby from his clouded memories of bloated lancet skies and the lapping of sweet dulcet little waves against the vast shoals of the cove where he was born, shimmering like diamonds against the water's surface. It was only Julie's low whimpers and the sniffling that always preceded a bout of sobbing, that compelled him to begin. Rubbing her back gently as the words tumbled forth. " _The selkie song is bright, to waken all who follow. Manannan will lead and Tír na nÓg will follow..."_

She stilled in his arms, soothed by the song that had once lulled him too as a child. Sitting on the banks of the Celtic Sea, cradled in his mother's arms. _Their_ mother’s arms. _"Dúlamán na binne buí, Dúlamán Gaelach. Dúlamán na farraige, B'fhearr a bhí in Éirinn."_ It sounded like Gaelic on his tongue now, but that wasn't what it was, not really. Yet translating the old language for a human child's lullaby was simple enough. 

_"Long, long we prayed to hear the selkie song. And now we pray again that her song will never end..."_

When Julie was finally down, he stood, toddler-laden, clambering to his feet both slowly and hopefully gentle enough not to stir Julie from her fitful loose-limbed slumber. 

His tiny redheaded charge snuffled a little when finally left bereft of his warm neck, but soon made do with her numerous blankies and teddies. He spoiled her rotten with whatever he had. She was his heart. 

John curled up near her cradle, studded with shells and sea-glass of all colors and sizes, still scared to leave her be, wrapping their pale webbed hands together and rocking her back and forth with the instinctive motion of the sea that never left him... before finally nodding off himself.

  
~

 _“My heart is pierced by Cupid_  
_I disdain all glittering gold_  
_There is nothing can console me_  
_But my jolly sailor bold_  
_His hair it hangs in ringlets_  
_His eyes as black as coal_  
_My happiness attend him_

_Wherever he may go.”_

~

  
Julie’s father died while their mother was heavily pregnant with her.

Then, the day after Julie’s birth, she too was gone.

But not to the afterlife like her fisherman lover, instead she went back home to the sea.

She wasn’t a human lass, perhaps the understatement of the century.

She bore John to the sea, raised him in the sea, then when she fell for a human fisherman, she brought John aground with her. He was her son. Her son just as inhuman as she, perhaps even more so. But it didn’t stop him from learning to behave and live as a human boy. He learned to cast out nets with his fisherman father and bring in the day’s catch with a smile on his face. To walk along on his broad flat human feet and to have his light skin freckle in the sunshine.

He had always been strange, even to the folk beneath the sea.

His mother was a _moruadh_ , a _merrow,_ one of the sidhe of _Tir fo Thoinn_.

And John should have been born one as well, yet he did not resemble any sort of male merrow. His hair was soft and downy brown, dark, his eyes the color of emerald scale and his _cohullen druith_ resembled a red sealskin instead of a pearly cap. He looked the prettiest human child when he was small and then as comely human youth when he grew. Instead of the tiny green stunted creatures that were merrow men, exceptionally ugly and pig-faced, stealing the souls of human men to seal in jars down in the deepest darkest trenches of the sea. They were so cruel and ugly, that many merrow women refused to mate with them.

Many, like his mother, chose humans.

A few, also like his mother, chose selkies.

John’s father was a selkie man.

A seal in the sea and a remarkably beautiful man when he shed his sealskin to walk about on land. A son of the Orkney Isles.

Poor John was born with merrow and selkie blood in his veins, doubly tethered to the sea.

Yet he still grew on the land, loved by a poor fisherman named Arthur Deacon as his own son, and loved by his mother, his human father called her Lily, as her only child.

Until Julie.

His _half-merrow, half-human_ baby sister, who changed everything.

No more early morning breakfast together or dancing around the kitchen in colorful socks. No more beach days playing hooky from school, running around in the salty spray and chasing the seagulls away. No more gentle kisses goodnight or hugs that always smelled like morning mist and sea-salt clinging to wet skin.

He was left alone with a baby girl who was never going to be merrow enough to follow him home, or human enough to stay.

After losing their family, being near the water hurt too much.

John spirited them away to _London_ where sewage and pollution clogged up public waterways and even the cleanest beaches were all vaguely ill and riddled, rotted inside. It was nothing like their true home in Ireland, in the Celtic Sea. A home that Julie wouldn't even come close to remembering in a couple of years, but that John would never forget. He would study at uni and she would never have to hear the rumor-mill in Leistershire or Dublin. She could be as human as nature allowed her to be. He would put shoes on her feet, gloves and mittens on her hands to cover up her webs, teach her how to walk like a human instead of with a rolling gait like she was on a ship. Teach her to speak, eat and act as a human. Hopefully her merrow side would fade with time.

She would never know his pain.

It wasn't hers to hold, hers to bear. 

How being far from his true home ached like a traumatic amputation, how it still buzzed up his body like phantom pain.

How he would have to swim in the Thames and sit in salt-filled baths once a week to just breathe.

How the sealskin often locked away in his closet was their biggest secret, only brought out when he was desperate. _(When he started to forget his mother’s face and it became painful how Julie would never know her, he would change and slip into the water, dandying her on his tail-fin and making her giggle. If she didn’t have their world, at least she had him)._

Julie would be _human._

Julie would be _happy._

He would make sure of it.

  
~

 _“My father is a merchant_  
_The truth I now will tell_  
_And in great London City_  
_In opulence doth dwell_  
_His fortune doth exceed_  
_200,000 gold_  
_And he frowns upon his daughter_

_Who loves a sailor bold.”_

~

  
In hindsight, perhaps the day he was going to audition for a local band, was not the ideal morning for a swim lesson.

But it was too late now, as he quickly stumbled from the greasy waters of the Thames, a naked Julie in his arms, the wet and slippery sluice of a little girl wriggling about like a gasping fish on a line as he pulled those chubby arms through the holes of her pacific blue frilly dress and fluffed the tutu out properly. She would whine if he didn’t.

He peeled a piece of plastic out of her mouth, sighing.

Humans really were disgusting creatures when it came to matters of pollution. _What was so hard about not throwing trash, sewage and rotting corpses in a place where other creatures lived and breathed?_

John plopped the fussy little girl into her pram, pressing a stuffed starfish into her arms for her to nibble and slobber on as he rushed through the bustling avenues of London. The pram made for a remarkable good battering ram.

Oh and perhaps his appearance did as well.

He was dressed in a pair of black swim trunks and burlap sandals despite the chilly weather outside, a red shawl _(his pelt)_  tucked over his shoulders, fluttering behind him like a cape, and with his chest bare. Sopping wet, enough to leave puddles in his wake, with those emerald eyes glittering like the stray scales that often peppered his sun-dappled brown waves of hair after a swim. Not ugly, just… _odd._

Something that compelled the other passerby to give him a wide berth.

It didn’t matter though, not really. 

Not when he could look at his baby sister and be consumed by childhood memories, days spent with his webbed pale feet dangling off the edge of their old boat: _The Roan Inish_. His loose long dark tresses flying about, the salt-curls that always shone oddly in the summer's sun and his webbed hands that had reached up into the painted sky, hugging at a man unseen. His adoptive human father, the most important man he'd never known. 

He had loved John’s mother, even though everyone on their small island had called her _strange_ and _otherworldly._ She with her wild black hair and eyes that always returned to, longed for, the sea. She was a good wife, a good mother to John. But she never quite belonged to The Emerald Isle. Sometimes it seemed like John had her coloring, the same untamable dark hair and lost eyes, the same dappled skin swathed in freckles. _A Dark One_. Julie was more like her father had been, with her soft red hair and mocha eyes, warm and sweet. _One for land, one for sea._ As ancient as the rules that governed any world. 

But fuck _nature_ , he was resolute, neither hell or high water would drag him away from the tiny redhead in his care.

Nothing, it would seem, except for his audition.

The kind-looking older receptionist at Imperial College's practice rooms took one look at the amp, bass and pram, and was happy enough to relieve him of his little girl for a session.

“I’ll pay you for your troubles.” His voice was soft, quiet, melodic, he absolutely detested being a burden on anyone and she shook her head.

“I love this age.” Twirling a lock of red. “My own are grown, you see. So I take any chance I can to cuddle a little one.”

Resolute in the knowledge that should anything happen, little Julie could easily kill and eat her captors. John strode into the room with instrument and equipment in hand, still dripping wet, but with a smile on his face that proudly showed off the gap in his front teeth.

Strode, unknowingly, into a _new life._

  
~

 _“Come all you pretty fair maids_  
_Whoever you may be_  
_Who love a jolly sailor_  
_That plows the raging sea_  
_While up aloft in storm_  
_From me his absence mourn_  
_And firmly pray arrive the day_

_He's never more to roam.”_

~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~


	2. Down To The Sea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh! Sooooo funny story, I just realized I had this sitting finished and not posted, probably for a while. :) 
> 
> Also OMG thank you so much for the lovely comments, I will answer them ASAP :) 
> 
> So surprised anyone read this :D

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Features: Down to the Sea from The Little Mermaid 2, and The Selkie Girls song below. ;)
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6VZdWjUEKM

_“You are my world my darling_  
_What a wonderful world I see_  
_You are the song I'm singing_  
_You're my beautiful Melody…”_

 

Arthur knew the boy wasn’t _his._

Lily had come from the water with the little boy’s hand in her own, and he was just as otherworldly as she. The fisherman could have see it in the boy’s eyes alone, they shone a color he had never seen before in a human iris, a vivid green that he was sure had only been possible in artificial plastics and mixed acrylic paints. Not gazing back upon him from a child'd visage.

But he loved them both with all his heart.

He had expected the boy to be terrified of him, the child was a creature of sea and wind, of salt and sky, of a wild and wide ocean found fathoms below. Arthur had expected him to recoil from his mother’s confinement. For the child to blame the young fisherman for the loss of their home, and subsequently their _lives_ as they knew them.

Instead, the boy had regarded him thoughtfully.

The would-be suitor did the same.

But looking at him long enough played tricks on Arthur’s human eyes and for a moment, in the child’s round face and wet dark hair, he saw the flicker of a seal.

The same creatures that dotted the coast and the beach near his little stone cottage home, resting on the outskirts of the tiny island town in which he had lived all his life.

Suddenly the little boy had surged forwards, once a millennia in a millisecond had passed, to lay his cold, forever-damp, and webbed hands on Arthur’s bare stomach. It was the highest place he could reach.

Then the otherworldly thing tilted his head back and stretched up his face as high as it would go, waiting for something.

Arthur bent over in confusion at the sight, and the child quickly pressed his salty lips to Arthur’s own, inhaling deeply as if to memorize the human’s scent. It was an entirely practical gesture at first and then as his little boy got older, became one of pure affection and love. The boy did the same to his mother and would have done so to any kind passerby in the street, if Arthur hadn’t learned to stop him at every turn.

The intimate touching could easily be misconstrued as a kiss and he worried for his son, what people would think, what people would _do_. The island folk were a cold and judgement lot at the best of times. But for Arthur to have married an outsider and taken on her fatherless son? He worried. 

_(The mere idea of someone harming his child, physically or emotionally, made him sick)._

Lily insisted that he give the boy a human name, if only to protect him from the rumors that so often prevailed in the islands, so he named the child: _John Richard Deacon._ After both himself and his father, a strong sturdy name like the currach they built together and the nets they wove for their boat. His boy was like a limpet, always on his hip. Where Arthur went, his little shadow did too.

They checked the crab traps together, brought in the nets during good and stormy weather, and he taught the little boy everything he knew.

Arthur Deacon learned early on, the _power_ of John’s voice. Of all the voices from down below. 

Once the child had caught Irish-Gaelic’s slippery tongue with his own and then English, he could communicate just fine when he chose to. John learned very quickly the importance of silence and when to exercise it, but his song was _different._

The first time Arthur heard his son sing, it was off the side of their boat, trilling broken melodies to the fish in the sea as they went out past the cliffs, to the shoals beyond. He felt the world around him go dark at the edges. And the next thing he knew, he was coughing up lungfuls of water on the grainy sand of the beach. His son’s face was buried in his chest, sobbing wretchedly.

_“Tá brón orm, a Dheaidí!” I’m sorry, Daddy!_

_Sorrow is upon me._

Merrow song was not something meant to be heard by human ears, _ever._

They made ships run aground, men and women drown themselves, children walk off cliffs and into the sea, it could make milk curdle, flowers bloom, free faerie folk from bindings, and all manner of strange things. But most things caused by Merrow song were tragic and sad.

_His poor boy._

Arthur carried his crying child along the beach for a while to calm him, soothing him with the rocking motion of his arms instead of the sea.

_“Tá mo chroí istigh ionat.”_

He whispered it into his son’s dark hair, long and shiny like the slippery pelt of a seal.

The truth of his heart, of the life he had given away to two creatures of the sea.

_My heart is in you._

Arthur knew then, that the boy _was_ his.

  
~

 _“Down to the sea we go_  
_Down to a world I know_  
_There's never been_  
_Not ever before_  
_A child born of sea and shore…”_

~

  
He was late.

It was made more than obvious by the fact that the band’s amps were all rolled over to one corner of the room, a guitar was being settled back into its case and their drummer seemed to be taking apart his kit as they buzzed about. John swallowed, _hard._ Definitely not the morning for a swim lesson then. But it was too late to do much about it now. So he steeled himself and walked further in, pushing his amp along with one foot and toting his bass, comfortably slung across his shoulders.

“Excuse me, is this the bassist audition?”

The three blokes seemed to freeze all at once, then begrudgingly looked over at him, all of them taking their sweet time to do so.

The drummer did so first, an angry retort seemingly playing peekaboo on his lips.

But it faded into something else, the moment their eyes met. All he heard from the blond was a pointed exhale of breath and a quiet _bloody hell._

The guitarist was fussing with his case, so he spoke up without so much as looking at John.

“Sorry mate, you’ve just about missed it. We wouldn’t mind hearing you play a bit though, if you don’t mind us ordering you about for while.”

Their frontman smiled as he turned to see John standing there, in all his glory. “Of course we don’t mind! Ignore Bri, all the others were right shit. Now darling, if you’d ple—.” But his voice died the moment he took it all in. The moment he took _John_ all in.

Suddenly, there were hands cupping his face and twisting it, this way and that. The frontman’s eyes were big and dark, the same shade as the deepest chasms in the darkest portions of the sea. Akin to the flesh of sleeper sharks that lurked near corpses, riddled with hagfish resting on the bottom. “Darling boy, are your eyes genuinely that color? I’ve only ever seen paints in that shade… They’re practically _glowing_ , dear!”

John simply stared at the boy, whose face was inches away from his own. Blinking and inherently self-conscious of his own appearance. He knew it was _different_ , that it wasn't quite ordinary, there would always be something _off_ about him to human eyes and sensibilities. It was true for all their kind.

But it was rare for someone to so vocally and physically point it out.

“I simply _must_ paint you!”

The frontman trilled, grinning from ear-to-ear and exposing his prominent teeth. He looked a bit like the human incarnation of an orca. Not the psychotic and infirm ones of modern day amusement parks, those filled him with a true and visceral sense of pain and grief. But for the grand beasts he’d swum with many times before in his youth and childhood. Those dark eyes and teeth, complete with his imposing demeanor and tactile nature, were very reminiscent of a killer whale. A true orca.

“Alright.” His voice was slight, pinched and tight. Wondering exactly how long the older boy was going to cling to his face. “My name is um… _John Richard Deacon, born on the nineteenth of August, 1951_ and it’s quite nice to meet you—?” That was the year his human father had bestowed upon him, carved it into the side of his own currach.

“Freddie Mercury!” The bloke chimed in, finally letting go of John’s face and stepping back to throw out his arms dramatically, stars alight in his eyes. “You can call me Freddie though, love. The frontman and lead singer of her majesty, _Queen!”_ Complete with gaudy hand waves and John’s tentative applause, unsure of what else to do with his hands.

“That pixie over there is _Roger_ , but you can call him _Blondie.”_

The blond in question bristled visibly and threw one of his drumsticks at Freddie’s head, it missed by a mile, nearly hitting the guitarist on the other side of the room. “Hey!”

“And that one with half his weight made up of sheer hair-fluff is Brian, our dearest _Brimi Hendrix._ ”

“Fred…” Cue a long-suffering sigh from the taller bloke, who was still glaring across the room at Roger, who in turn was pretending to look innocent as he stared at the ceiling.

Freddie clapped his hands together and flashed that blindingly bright smile of his, folding his lips up in a way that seemed pointlessly uncomfortable, in order to shield his jutting teeth.

John did wonder why he was trying to hide his best asset, but thought better of asking about it. Sometimes humans did things that perplexed him, even after so many years among them, even living as one.

“Oh darling!” John’s eyes of _St. Elmo’s Fire_ widened at Freddie’s exclamation. “Where in all bloody hell are your proper clothes? It’s freezing outside and you’re in sodding shorts, without a shirt no less! You must be practically _numb_ by now!”

John huffed out a little laugh, shaking his head and letting his sea-kissed locks float up and down with the motion. “It's alright, I don’t.”

“Don’t what?” The opinionated frontman wrinkled his nose. “Dress for the occasion?”

“Get cold.”

Roger’s cymbal slipped out of his hands as he was stowing it away and made a loud clattering sound that could have woken the dead, and very nearly startled the human skin off of John. “ _Oh come off it, mate!_ _Everyone_ gets cold!” His icy tone was dripping with patronization, as if the bassist moonlighted as a soft-spotted child. But he allowed it.

“It really doesn’t bother me. I was out swimming earlier, it’s why I was late.” Thinking wistfully of his baby girl in his arms, watching her trill and shriek at the cold bite of the water, a temperature that her merrow skin and fat would protect her from. He had cradled her against his soft chest for a while, lazily batting his tail to send them floating about in little circles against the tide.

Then he had sat her up, like a _queen_ on his tail-fin, as he bobbed her up and down. Beaming as she squealed and clapped her chubby webbed hands together with joy.

“Where could you have gone bloody swimming in London?” Roger’s obtrusive disbelief stunned him from his reverie.

“The Thames.”

The blond’s jaw dropped. “You went for a dip in the ruddy _Thames?!”_

_Oh yeah, that was a bit illegal come to think of it. Or at least frowned upon._

John shrugged, playing with the strap on his bass, peeling at the threads. “It’s like you said, there are no other places to go swimming in London.” He needed the water. He needed the sea. The same way he needed a moment, an instant, to swim and breathe without the land’s suffocating air pressing down on him, like an anvil or an anchor.

A shy smile flickered to life on Brian’s lips, his eyes properly raking over John for the first time, pupils dilating a little in surprise. “John Deacon, you must be the craziest bloke in all of the seven seas. …Can you play that thing then?” Nodding towards the scuffed bass case slung across his back, parts of which he’d fashioned himself, out of woven seaweed and shells. Cowries, strips of sea glass that fractaled in the light, a few halves of bivalved pieces, scaphopods and all other manner of deep sea debris. It was comforting to carry around bits of his first home.

“I like to think I can.”

  
~

“ _Up from the sea we rise_  
_Up to the world of skies_  
_Forever to be_  
_Together as one_  
_Under the sea_  
_And under the sun…_ ”

~

  
They put him through his paces, not that he expected any less.

Watching and listening intently to him strum out the bass-lines from _Hey Bulldog, Rain_ , and _Helter Skelter,_ as well as a couple pieces by _The Who._

Then they let him improvise and expand on some of their own basic lines. Some of which were the most monotonous and boring-as-shit pieces that he’d ever played before in his life. He had to hide his grimace during a few portions, not wanting to be cut loose for having a bad attitude. But when Roger finally got re-setup, near the end of the audition session, he and John played off of each other so well, feeding off each other’s raw energy. That the rhythm section practically exploded, like a _sonic volcano._

The sound was enough to make John smile brightly from ear-to-ear.

It reminded him of being a small boy in Arthur Deacon’s lap once more, pressing a conch shell to his doting father’s ear.

“ _Ni tir gan teanga.”_

_There be no nation without language._

“That was fucking _brilliant!”_ Roger laughed, head tossed back with joy when the sound finally died, twirling his sticks around in his gifted hands. Blue eyes dancing like the shoals of fish that swam in droves beneath the surface, flicking and flittering in the thinly filtered oceanic light. “You’re bloody _in!”_

John felt a blush spread across his cheeks as he smiled at his bare feet, finally dry after all of that. He enjoyed playing barefoot and feeling the vibrations through the floor.

Brian groaned. “Rog, we have to discuss it first.”

“What’s there to discuss? He’s quiet, good to look at, and he’s a great bassist! Or did you just miss the part where _we made the floor shake!”_

Freddie nodded along to their drummer, echoing the sentiment with a smile of his own. “He does have a point Bri, John’s lovely.”

“I know that, but we still have to make a pros and cons chart and discuss the changing demographics of the band.” The guitarist was so far inside his own head, that he was checking off items on the agenda by using his long spindly fingers. Mouthing other things to add as he thought of them, slowly opening and closing his supple lips pensively, John was staring at them for so long that he forgot to blink.

“What _demographics?”_ Roger growled, pouting and crossing his arms across his chest.

Freddie’s brow furrowed. “We’re not making a map, dear.”

“That’s _geographic!”_

John cleared his throat delicately, his voice low and melodic. A song that would never leave him. “Erm… before you make your decision, there’s something you should know.” He was wringing his fingers, around and around in a vice, as they glanced over at him in blatant confusion.

He sighed, “I have a little girl, her name’s Julie. She’s always going to be the most important thing in my life and it’s just _us_ so… I understand if that changes your opinion of me, perhaps for the worst, but of all the things I’m unsure of in my life, my baby and my subsequent _duty to her_ isn’t one of them.”

It would _never_ be one of them.

Julie was his responsibility, his heart, his soul, and he needed to give her the life that she deserved. The life that their human father could no longer give her and that their merrow mother wasn’t _there_ to give her anymore.

He would forever guide her, forever stay wherever she needed him to be.

If that meant laying her in a little currach cradle, letting her bob and sway in the ocean as her bed, then he would stand up on the jetty, watching and holding her fast for all his days.

 _“Là dhomh 's mi 'm beinn a' cheathaich…”_ He would sing into the waters below. _One day when I was on the misty mountain…_

 _“Far al a leò ro ho bhi ò_  
_Hoireann is ò ho rò bhi o ho_  
_Hi rì ho ro ho bha ò hug ò ro.”_

Watching a glittering red tail sweep up in the distance, a flash of green hair the color of seaweed disappearing behind a buoy.

_“Gill'Eòghanain mòr an gaisgeach.”_

_Gilleonan, the great hero…_

Sometimes he would wrap her in his pelt or tuck her into his pouch, when she couldn’t be soothed and it was only the salt of the sea on her skin and the feel of a second skin atop her own that would do the trick. He worried for her.

Goodness, he worried so much for her.

_“Ruairi òg an t-oighre maiseach.”_

_Young Rory, the handsome heir._

He loved her enough to know that his stories and songs would stay relics of her childhood, that there would be a time when he would stop spinning the yarns of _Mac Lir_ or telling her tales of _Tír na nÓg_ and _Tír fo Thuinn_. That eventually, he would give up who he was, for her.

And pretend that their kind was nothing more than a fairytale.

For her? _Anything._

  
~

“ _This is your world my darling_  
_One world the land and sea_  
_My hope for you for always_  
_Is that your heart will know part of me.”_

  
~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~ 


	3. The Great Selkie Of Sule Skerry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Song is June Tabor's version of The Great Selkie Of Sule Skerry. 
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFFPcYorxjc

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for sticking with me this long :)))

_“In nor'way land there lived a maid_  
_"Hush ba lu lilly" she did sing,_  
_For little ken I my baby's father_  
_Nor yet the land that he dwells in.”_

 

 

  
She sat on the salt-slick skerry stones, her long tendrils of viridescent hair batting to and fro in the wind.

John watched her as the waves crashed around her mortal feet, her heart still ensnared by a fisherman’s line, lost in the deep. Her belly was round, heavy with child, it was why she hadn’t gone out with Arthur on _The Roan Inish_ that day. She wasn’t there to save him when the anchor caught and he rushed to free it. Or when he slipped into the water, hitting his head on the side of the boat, his steal-toed boot twisting up in his own fishing line. The mortal man, beholden to two creatures of the deep, took his first and last breaths of salt and sea, closing his eyes as the frantic seals tried to bat him to the surface. But it was too late.

All they could do was bring him home again.

Instead of the mournful flowers that tradition dictated, the river lilies and orchids that he saw adorning the graves of the other lost souls in their small island cemetery, John would bring sea-shells to lay beneath the heavy stone celtic cross where his father lay. It felt wrong to bury a fisherman in the earth, sealing his soul away from the home that he had chosen all those years ago, so John would bring the sea to him, pressing the shells against the ground until they joined his father in the heavy soil.

When Julie was a weight in John’s arms instead of their mother’s belly, and she too was claimed by the sea, the other villagers would whisper terrible things about him and his slumbering child, as if he had no ears with which to hear them.

It was long believed that if a girl or boy went missing on the ebb and flow of the tide, that their selkie or merrow lover had come to drag them down into the depths of the bottomless blue, forgetting that mere mortals could never live beyond their sandy shores.

Arthur Deacon was raised on the isle, he was born into the waters as his baptism basin and was a fisherman from his first breaths to his last. All the folk who lived near and far, knew the Deacons, a hardworking family that had dwindled over the years, until only a few small snatches of the bloodline remained. One being the hale and hardy Arthur, who worked long and hard without complaint for those who requested his service.

The strange girl he took as his wife and her odd child, were the first strikes against his character, in all the years that he had lived on the isle. They knew she wasn’t from any mortal place and that the boy she bore was the same. But she was a good wife for their Arthur, gentle and devoted in all she did, and the small wiry child was hale and strong, akin to his adoptive father as he stared up at the redhead in adoration.

They brought fish in with their nets and fed the folk who needed it.

Many a family with a bad haul or a failed crop would be greeted by the sight of the strange boy on their doorstep, with an armful of blue deep sea lobsters and crabs, as well as a soft smile on his oddly curled mouth, below those glowing harlequin eyes.

But it didn’t stop them from blaming him and Julie, especially once Arthur was found drowned on the surf and their mother was returned to it.

They said that his mother had obviously drowned his human father in cold blood, by dragging him down deep into the depths of the sea, and leaving his bloated corpse washed up on shore for her monstrous bairns to eat.

 _Then_ , furtively said as he passed by, _if that boy knew what was good for him, he'd find a good Orkney family to leave the girl with and return to the sea with his whelper._ Never to see his half-human sister again. The good isle folk would do him a _service_ by raising her to be a good fisherman’s wife, to clip the webbing on her hands and feet until they grew thick and scarred, near immobilizing the joints. Before marrying her off to the first man who would see her grow into a trowie flower, and claim her far too early.

That would be their _repayment_ for his kindness as a boy.

Was it any surprise, that he was gone with his baby sister by midsummer’s eve?

~

 _“It happened on a certain day_  
_As this fair maid lay fast asleep,_  
_That day there came a grey selkie_  
_And sat him down at her bed feet.”_

~

  
“Oh.”

Brian’s mouth was turned perfectly taut and spherical, his lips became a round and opalesque pink pearl.

The youth's eyes were large enough and expressive enough for John to see the apprehension, and then the ensuing sting of guilt at that apprehension, that dawned in them. John wanted to reach over and smooth a gentle webbed hand over those inky curls, to tell him that it was alright. That he wasn't offended, that he understood where the guitarist was coming from. A single parent bassist wasn't in anyone’s master-plan for musical success.

John meekly packed away his bass and unplugged his amp, it was fun while it lasted. “I’ll give you all a night or so... to _discuss_ it.”

Brian nodded, shame burning high in his cheeks, big dark eyes turned askance. While Freddie was clearly stunned into silence, his skin a touch paler than it had been before, but his most visceral reaction was to lunge over and cover Roger’s pink mouth, as the drummer’s pert little nose screwed up and he parted his lips, inches away from a vicious tirade no doubt.

“That would be wonderful dear, we’ll give you a ring, yes?”

They wouldn’t be calling him, not in a million bloody years, he could see it in Freddie’s rigid posture and the sorrowful heaviness of his eyes, a far cry from the jovial boy that he’d met at the beginning of his audition. Roger seemed a touch angry at the revelation, although John had only met the boys an hour or two before, and was happy that Roger had been forbidden his undue scathing monologue. He was sure it contained no surprises under the sun and sea.

He left the soundproofed room with his head held high and his heart stomped into the dirt, remembering the way the moist earth had felt on his tiny hands, damp from the sea mist, as he pushed the shells _down down down_. 

His world was only set to rights, when he had a sleeping Julie placed in his arms again. Her resting face just as lovely and serene as it had been when she was a newborn, the first time she was laid in his arms and would never truly leave them. 

The sweet grandmotherly receptionist helped him to gather up his belongings with his one available arm, the other was too busy cradling his tiny girl to manage much. She yawned into his neck and curled her little mittened fingers into the small baby hairs on the back of his nape. They were still wet from the swim and it comforted her, while he merely shivered at the sensation.

“She was a complete dove.”

The older woman folded up Julie’s blanket and laid it delicately in the pram. “A right little peach.” Before doing the same with the red pelt that hung over his free arm without a second thought, twisting it up with the upmost care. He felt his heart clench on instinct, but didn’t stop her.

She was kind.

“Didn’t go well then, did it?” Her voice was soft and reminiscent of his own mother’s. He smiled softly, resignedly, and shook his head, saltwater waves of brown hair falling over his vermillion green eyes.

“Not really, no.” John huffed a small, self-deprecating laugh. He hadn't been expecting very much though, so the disappointment was minimal. 

“Well, buck-up, dearie.” She reached up to pat him on the cheek, he leaned into the touch. “It’ll get better soon, I guarantee it.”

He believed her.

It was only when he was home again, attempting to lie Julie down in her crib without waking her and trying his best to extract a clump of his tawny hair from her sharp-toothed little maw, that he realized… he had never left his number for the band.

  
~

 _“Awake, awake, my pretty maid_  
_It's oh how soundly you do sleep._  
_For here am I your baby's father,_  
_Sitting here at your bed feet.”_

~

  
Part of him _desperately_ wanted to teach Julie how to hunt.

The same way his mother had once taught him.

Moving through the depths of the sea, chasing shoals of fish to and fro, running his webbed hands over coral and algae that spread like lace across the jagged calcite rocks beneath the surface. His baby sister would never know the thrill of the first mouthful of her first catch, gulping down a full swim bladder in one go and savoring the slippery sensation. She would never play amongst the jellyfish that bobbed like mauve quivering masses, tassels and tendrils wiggling and wobbling below. Chasing her own red-gold tail as she dove and splashed beneath them, trilling with joy.

Sometimes, the pain that Julie would never know that life, was greater than his own knowledge that he would never know it again.

“Did you want these tuna, mate?”

John blinked at the dizzying jolt from his memories and smiled with too many teeth on reflex, handing over the money to the boy working a stall at Billingsgate Fish Market.

He then caught sight of a familiar shape in a bin off to the side, long thin body, an odd blue-green frill down its back and small eyes turned glassy, staring at nothing. A long-snouted lancetfish, he’d know that wide mouth of needle thin teeth and gray scales anywhere. They tasted disgusting, gelatinous and thick, and they didn’t digest food well, so it was often two meals in one. Yet they were found just about anywhere in the ocean and because of that, they were a very common first catch item. They were _his_. He remembered his pride as he'd swum over to show his mother, catch in his jaws, and then her amusement as he recoiled at the taste. 

“How much for the lancetfish?”

The wharf boy’s eyes practically bulged out of his skull. “….Mate, you can’t _eat_ those.”

Speaking to him slowly, as if John were as young as Julie, sitting in her pram and chewing on an striped eel that he'd given her earlier in the day.

“How much?” He pressed.

The boy raised up his scarred hands from fisherman's netting, as if in surrender. “Fine, fine, it’s your funeral. Just take it.” John did with a shrug, wrapping it up with the rest of the tuna and prawns he'd purchased.

“Actually,” The youth sounded shy all of a sudden. “…one of my friends has a stall a few paces down and caught a spiny dogfish this morning, did you want that one as well?” A spiny dogfish, a small shark that would feed them for a day or two.

“Sure.”

The last time he’d taken a bite of a spiny dogfish, she’d been full of unfertilized eggs. Which had tasted _fantastic._

He may never be able to take his sister hunting, but that didn’t mean she would never know the awful taste of a lancetfish. She whined and spat it out almost instantly, looking at him with flushed pink apple-blossom cheeks and cold accusation in her lovely eyes. He just couldn’t help the laughs that bubbled up from his chest, a bit like his mother must have felt on the day of his own first catch, and it was only after a few spoonfuls of proper tunafish that she seemed to forgive him. Using both her tiny webbed hands to guide each spoonful to her lips.

It was a fairly simple meal, cubed tuna with a bed of toasted quinoa, edamame, mango, cherry tomatoes, seaweed, and cucumbers, salted with brine.

And one of Julie’s favorites.

He could also do adaptations with whatever fish was best at the market that day.

Salmon went best with wild rice and nuts, while tuna and shrimp went together with coconut milk and papaya, and for his spiny dogfish, he contemplated a bed of cucumber and seaweed.

John was singing softly to Julie as she greedily ate him out of house and home, and he pressed a kiss to her halo of tangled red curls, as no matter how often he tended to them, they seemed hard-pressed to never agree.

“ _Oh woe alas this weary fate,_  
_This weary fate that's laid on me,_  
_That a man should come from the west of Hoy_  
_And father his ain child on me.”_

Everyone knew the story of _The Great Selkie Of Sule Skerry_  on the isles where he had grown, and everyone sang their own version of the tale. But still, it always ended in the same tragic way, as most selkie stories did.

 _“And she has nursed his little wee son_  
_For seven years all at her knee_  
_And when seven years were past and gone_  
_He's come with gold and white money.”_

With a boy being taken away from his mother.

“ _And now my dear, will you take the ring?_  
_Will you take the ring and wed with me?_  
_You may go to the wedding with whom you will,_  
_I'm sure you'll never marry me.”_

And losing his life for penance of it.

John was guiding another spoonful of thick congealing tuna to his baby sister’s wide open mouth, making all the necessary exaggerated faces to keep her interested, when his ears pricked up outside of his control. A hand was at his door, turning the knob.

An instinctual tremor went down his body all at once and he was instantly on alert, teeth bared, standing in front of Julie as if to protect her.

_“John!”_

At the sudden shout of his name, he screeched a war-cry, one that tiny Julie echoed without comprehension of its meaning, a sound he often tried to teach her to humanize into _scared little girl_ instead of _bloodthirsty siren sea-monster,_ to no avail. 

With one fluid motion he'd snagged a spare _Damascus karambit_ from beneath his countertop, one of his old iron fishing knives, and flung it at the intruders, whose outlines he could just barely make out in the lowlight against his door. Ah, he’d forgotten to leave the patio light on. There was a gentle thunk as it embedded in the soft wood of the doorframe leading outside and a satisfying couple of screams as the intruders realized that he meant business and ducked for cover. 

Next time wouldn't be a warning shot. 

"Did you just throw a _knife_ at us?!" 

A familiar feminine shriek assaulted his ears and… _wait_... 

He flicked on the patio light to expose three young men in varying states of shock, surprise and fear.

Oh.

Freddie, Brian and Roger.

That… _complicated_ things.

Julie used her tiny hands to scoop up fat sticky globs of green and guts, smashing them into her face and chewing heartily, like a movie patron or an eager fan getting ready to see a show.

  
~

 _“I'll put a gold chain round his neck,_  
_And a gay gold chain I'm sure it will be._  
_And if e'er he comes to the nor'way land,_  
 _you'll know for sure that it is he._

 _And you will marry a gunner good,_  
_And a gay good gunner he will be,_  
_And he'll go out on a May morning_  
_And he'll shoot your son and he'll shoot me.”_

_~ ~ ~_

_~ ~ ~_

_~ ~ ~_


	4. Siren Song

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Happy birthday to a most wonderful human being called Kris!!!!! @makesteverogersproud on tumblr and here as well. She is my beta and my lovely human friend!!!! She is one of the kindest and sweetest people that I have ever had the pleasure of knowing!!!! <333333 For her birthday, she asked for fluff. Unfortunately I am an angst-writer through and through. SO! She gets two different chapters in two different fics, in the hope that the happy from each chapter can make one happy chapter combined :) A million thanks to her! (And if you’re wondering why these chapters suck it’s because I couldn’t have her beta her birthday chaps guys, it woulda been so rude!) Anyway, here we go! 
> 
> Kris, thank you so much for everything and for being my friend above all else. <333 
> 
>  
> 
> Everyone else! ENJOY! :DDD

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Features Siren Song by SaraSinger42 on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw3z_rbfrFQ
> 
> And a single verse of '39 by Queen. 
> 
> (If you've left me a comment, I promise I will be answering them when I come home from work today, I just wanted to get her birthday chaps published right away :)). 
> 
> Ursilla's story and quote from: http://www.orkneyjar.com/folklore/selkiefolk/selbairns.html

_“Hear my voice beneath the sea_  
_Sleeping now so peacefully_  
_At the bottom of the sea_  
_Sleep for all eternity…”_

 

 

Part of John knew that their mother would always be with them, even in her marked absence from their lives.

Julie’s favorite doll, out of all her sea-themed memorabilia, was hand-knitted, light pink-skinned, with soft blue buttons for eyes and fingerless blue nubs for hands. Long strands of yellow yarn acted as its hair and a collection of little red stitches for a smile, soft as could be. Yet the first thing that caught everyone’s eyes about the toy, was the thick blue tail that the doll sported instead of human lower limbs, complete with little purple ridges meant to be fish scales sewn onto its surface. Comforting and soothing to the touch, yes, when he tucked it into Julie’s crib at night or when he rocked her on their net hammock outside.

But sometimes, it felt like the doll was watching him, reprimanding him. A scar, a memory of another time, forever reminding him that he would never be more than what she was.

He’d found the doll at a little hole-in-wall toy shop during their first week in London. Julie was enraptured with the thing, toting the doll about in her little arms whilst she toddled around on pale webbed feet.

“Mama!” She would trill, holding out the doll to her older brother, innocence shining in her young and painfully human eyes.

Arthur’s eyes.

“Wanee!” She would trill to him, the closest she could get to his human name, yet the tongue still came faster to her, as she grew like a weed on land, than it did for him as a boy, coming up from the sea. _“Mama!”_ It was what she called the toy.

The doll, with its pale imitation of their mother’s natural state and his own, was the closest that Julie would ever get to holding the woman who had once held them.

“Yes, _a leanbh.”_ He would coo to please her. “Mama.”

It was worth it, to see the way that she would clutch the soft loose-limbed doll ever closer to her chest, and nuzzle her face into the soft down, humming little songs of nothingness in her joy. Her songs were harmless, beautiful and haunting yes, but harmless nevertheless.

Sometimes he’d twirl them around the kitchen in time to her little ditties, often sung as sea shanties, unbeknownst to her.

With every passing day, John forced himself to forget something else.

To forget the soothing pressure of diving deep into the darkest trenches of the sea. The world of wonders hidden deep below.

The giant squid that all the modern marine biologists said was extinct, had brushed against his red tail more often than not. Anemones had stroked his hands as he played in coral reefs as a child, curled up with eels as he hid beneath outcroppings of bright coral. His mother was training him, chasing him to make him fast, searching him out to teach him the art of camouflage, teaching him to live at sea.

He forced himself to forget those days and replace them with memories of Julie’s first steps, her first words, of sharing ice-cream cones at the park, swinging on the swing-set until they were airborne.

Memories of a human life.

But no matter how hard he tried, those early days in the sea refused to leave him, his true nature refused to leave him, it was always there… resting just below the surface.

John closed his hand around the handle of the karambit, the blade had sunk a inch or two deep in the soft boughs of painted wood that made up his doorframe.

He ripped it out of its mooring without a second thought, then turned around, Julie sitting comfortably astride one hip and his old fishing knife glinting in the other. He must have seemed quite the imposing figure to the three boys sitting on his couch in varying states of disarray. John half-wondered as to the location of Freddie’s left boot and Roger’s actual speaking octave.

The aforementioned frontman was fanning himself with one hand, trying to recover from his dead faint, while Roger was half-sitting in Brian’s lap and clearly trying to play off the fact that all of them, even the neighbors, had heard him scream like a terrified little girl. While Brian himself was trying in vain to hold onto both of his bandmates, as if John and Julie were some kind of hellish primordial threat.

“Are you three alright?” John asked, sheathing the knife and slipping it into his belt loop as he hiked Julie up his hip. “Would some tea help?”

_“You threw a knife at us!”_

He rolled his eyes and strode back off towards his kitchen. Not coming back until he had settled an unwilling Julie into her currach cradle, fussing like the stubborn thing she was, and had a tea-tray resting in his hands. Setting everything down on his table and pouring out a cup of chamomile for each of the traumatized boys before him, pushing them over with what he hoped was a humanoid smile.

“I did.” He wasn’t going to deny it. “Because my baby was right next to me.” Said baby was soon screaming her little lungs off at being put aside in her cradle and John sighed, coming over to scoop her up and settle her on his hip once more.

“Now,” He pressed a kiss to Julie’s forehead, so that she would finally grow still and tuck her head beneath his chin with a little hum of happiness. “Why exactly are you in my house?”

They had made their stance abundantly clear during the latter part of his audition.

They knew it too, if their uneasy shifting and the pointed clearing of their throats were anything to go by. He hid the lower part of his face in Julie’s messy mop of red to disguise his smile.

“We need a bassist, and you’re the best we’ve heard.”

Roger looked him point-blank in the eyes to say it and the intensity of his gaze, nearly made John take a step back, he had never met a human with such piercing eyes before. Let alone one that was willing to stare him down. “What these two yuppies tried to keep me from saying before, is that if you gave even a quarter of the shit that you obviously give about your daughter to the band? Then we’re bound to conquer the world.”

The blond flashed him a toothy smile and John was reminded once more of a juvenile lemon shark, tail thwipping in the frothy water and twin dorsal fins cutting through the waves. Not because Roger was a threat, but because he _wasn’t._

Lemon sharks were relatively docile beings.

Despite all his efforts to the contrary, John remembered being young and running his hands over the raspy skin of their backs and pressing far too close, nose to nose.

_“So will you do it?”_

  
~ ~ ~

  
_“Sailors live so restlessly_  
_Come with me, sleep peacefully_  
_Listen to this siren's song_  
_Worry not for nothing's wrong…”_

  
~ ~ ~

  
The drive to create a pod was strong, no matter how long it had just been him and Julie.

That was the only explanation John had, for the way he felt compelled to press overfilled bowls of food into his new bandmates’ hands, _(an assortment of cubed fish for Roger and Freddie, and a seaweed and peanut stir fry that he quickly whipped up for Brian without being asked)_ , as well as herd them onto the couch in a huddle. That way, the more primal side of him reasoned, he could watch over all of them at once.

“Is this _raw?”_

Roger picked up a chunk of tuna and squished it between his fingers, top lip curling in something akin to disgust.

Freddie seemed to have no issue with it. Well, not after he dumped what looked like half a shaker’s worth of pepper on top of it. He even nudged Roger hard in the side with his bony elbow, flashing him a look that screamed: _If you insult our new bassist, darling, you’ll be deader than the fish in your lap._

“It tastes wonderful, dear!” His voice sounding pointedly striated, to the pair of beasts who regaled him thoughtfully.

John could only laugh to himself, as he rocked a wiggling Julie side to side, as if riding the crests of the sea, her chubby legs sitting splayed across his hip as usual. She was still fussing at all the strange people that surrounded them, despite his own warm comfort in it, and kept nudging at his lips with her tiny hands. She wanted a song. He’d sung her to sleep almost every night since her birth. And her little heels that periodically caught in his ribs, kept reminding him of that.

She wouldn’t sleep without it.

Not couldn’t, _wouldn’t_ , the little beastie simply refused to be agreeable.

But John wasn’t going to accidentally drown his new bandmates on the first night they spent together either. So she would have to make do.

He rocked her like a currach and shifted about, until her little fiery head plopped bonelessly onto his shoulder.

But it was a brief reprieve, and she was soon struggling again once more.

Writhing and fighting until another pair of hands, with long pale fingers that resembled bleached bone, wrapped around her tummy and lifted her from his grasp. He scented the air and knew that it was Brian. Otherwise he probably would have gone for the throat. Instead, he let the taller man try to cradle her and hid a laugh, when the guitarist found even more difficulty in the action than John himself. _Poor Bri had never held a baby in his life and it showed._

“She’s a bit fussy, let me just…” John carefully rearranged Brian’s limbs to properly hold Julie, bringing her to the other man’s collarbone and letting her bury her hot wet little face into the muscle below. The guitarist was flushed a pale pink at John’s ministrations and even more so when the boy leaned up on his tiptoes to brush Bri’s curls out of his eyes in thanks. Those soft webbed fingers lingering for just an instant too long.

“Thank you for taking her, my arms were getting a bit tired.” A lie, but Brian seemed to brighten up at the praise.

Soon both Freddie and Roger were up as well, each peering up at the little girl in Bri’s arms, who had finally stopped wriggling like a caught fish.

“She doesn’t really look like you, John.” Roger’s fair brows furrowed until they eagerly met in the middle. It wasn’t a lie, John with his vivid otherworldly green eyes and dark hair, was the opposite to Julie’s red curls and human eyes.

The bassist reached over and plucked up Julie’s tiny pale hand, pushing on it gently to expose the webs like his own. “I know, but we do share these.”

“Oh shit!” Instantly his hand was seized by two of Roger’s own, as his bandmates all gawked down at his webbed fingers. “How did we not notice your syndactyly before?”

Freddie pouted. “His what?” John could already sense that the oldest hated to be kept out of the loop.

“ _Syndactyly_ , the finger webbing. John and Julie’s fingers didn’t split during the sixth to eighth week of life in the womb.” But the longer Roger examined John’s hands the more perplexed he grew. “That’s so weird though…” Voice trailing up and off at the end, an unanswered question.

“What?” Brian raised an eyebrow and shifted when Julie started to buck against his hold, eyes not leaving John’s fingers.

“I’ve never seen syndactyly where all the fingers were incompletely webbed. Are your toes too?”

John nodded.

“And Julie’s?”

Another nod.

“And you can move all of them? Never had any surgery?” The biology geek in Roger was coming out in its full force and John liked it, even if being a curiosity reminded him far too much of being back in his tiny hometown, where the webs were a visible curse. _Ursilla’s Curse_ to be exact.

“Yes and no. They’ve never given me any issues and besides, the doctors back home just said we had _The Curse_ and barely gave us the time of day.” Trying to brush it off.

Freddie’s eyebrows met in the middle and his hands found his round hips, the bones poking through the skin like nobs. _“The Curse?_ Well that’s bloody _Medieval._ What did they give leech treatments too? Make poultices and potions?”

John didn’t bother to hide the mellifluous laughter that time. “Not quite. But I did grow up on a tiny island off the coast of Ireland, where everybody is related to everybody else and being an outsider is tantamount to blasphemy. Nobody liked my mother, she wasn’t from the island and the fact that she and I had hands like these, well… the kindest thing I can say about that, is that they were probably just afraid.”

The youngest boy carried their plates to the kitchen and his bandmates followed close behind. He wasn’t getting rid of them so easily.

“Afraid of what?”

John shrugged. “Something they didn’t understand.” He sighed. “You have to realize, this was a tiny fishing village where myth and superstition weren’t something to be laughed at. Old stories and songs were the same things as facts. So a boy with webbed feet and hands had _Ursilla’s Curse_ , not a medical condition.”

_". . . and many a clipping Ursilla clipped, to keep the fins from growing again; and the fins, not being able to grow in their natural way, grew into a horny crust on the palms of the hands and soles of the feet. And this horny substance can be seen in many of Ursilla's descendants to this day.”_

_Children born with selkiepaws._

“Who’s Ursilla? And why was she cursed? You gotta fill us in, mate. I’m pretty fucking lost.” Roger pouted as well, that sunbeam hair falling in his big larkspur eyes. “And what’s it got to do with your hands anyway?”

His hands were just hands to his bandmates, not a lifelong source of ostracizing shame. And John was just John.

He saw himself as a child again, racing up and down the sandy and stone-cobbled beaches of his youth. Innocence and happiness painted across his skin with the salty spray, only marred by the judging gazes that followed him wherever he went. The villagers knew of the curse, only spoken about in their stories and songs. In the same way they knew that the strange girl who came up from the sea, with her wandering eyes and hair that never dried, was not ordinary. Not one of them. And neither was her bairn.

“I’m sure you lot have something better to do than listen to an old fairytale.”

John reached over to press a familiar doll into Julie’s one free arm, the other was wrapped securely around Brian’s neck and didn’t seem to want to let go anytime soon.

Freddie slung his own matchstick arm around John’s narrow waist and cuddled up far too close to rest his cheek on the younger boy’s shoulder. “Not really, lovie. We just got this new bassist you see, and we sorely need to break him in.” A sharp black-varnished nail poked into his side, spurning yet another laugh from the younger man.

“Alright, alright, I’ll bloody tell you.” As he sat down on the vacated couch, the other boys pressed up on him like it was storybook time at the local library.

Beginning with a thin voice that grew in power the more he spoke, John told them the tale of another girl who came from the water. “Ursilla wasn’t her real name, it was what the man who found her called her. The man who stole her skin.”

“He stole her fucking _skin?!”_ Roger was wide-eyed and plainly horrified, his voice turned into a screech, like John had just described a girl being peeled alive. The brunet just shook his head, with a fond twitch of his lips.

“Her _seal_ skin,” He corrected, gently, reaching over to close Roger’s gaping mouth with a little clap. “She was a selkie. Or perhaps a merrow, some of the stories are a bit vague.” He drawled, slowly and pensively. His tone soft and euphonious to all who heard it, maybe even a touch wistful. “Either way, she wasn’t a human and her name wasn’t Ursilla. She belonged to the ocean, to its creatures and even to the sea-foam itself. But he stole that life away from her.” _Menfolk could be so cruel._

_But merfolk could do far worse._

_Menfolk could act thoughtlessly, like children, and never think through the consequences of such actions._

_But Merfolk could hold grudges for decades and then seek vengeance for past slights years hence. Chasing retribution for all of a man’s (and even his family’s) days. Curses by merfolk would never fade. They had no qualms about punishing the innocent for the blood crimes of a relative. A trait shared by all the sidhe._

_Never wrong the fae._

_Or your children and your children’s children would soon live to regret it._

“How?” Freddie asked, “I mean, how did losing her seal skin take her away from her home? Was she meant to be a seal in the water or something? A mermaid?”

Oddly enough, it wasn’t John who elaborated.

“Selkies are humans on land and seals in the water. Their seal skin lets them come up on land and go back as they please… merrows are their Irish counterpart, but they use a red cap instead of a seal skin to grow a tail in the water, like a proper mermaid.” Brian said it all so studiously, as if he were talking about astrophysics or his own passions instead of age-old folktales. Creatures that were supposed to be figments of myth and imagination.

Perhaps there was a touch of cryptozoologist in the willowy boy after all.

“How do _you_ know that?”

Brian went back to rubbing a hand up and down Julie’s back, soft pink adorning his cheeks again.

“My mother, she’s from Scotland and she told me stories as a child.”

John nodded, with a smile that didn't reach his eyes. “Then you already know the end of Ursilla’s tale. All selkie and merrow stories end the same way. With her finding her skin or cap and returning to the sea, leaving her husband-jailor and innocent children behind.” He hummed. “The children weren’t ordinary though, children of those unions never are. They would always long for the sea, a place they could never go, and would be born with webbed hands and feet in place of fins. No matter how many times they were cut, they would forever grow back worse and worse, until the limbs were turned immobile with scar tissue.” He shivered near-imperceptibly, with the echoed fear of that happening to Julie.

“It’s said that her descendants till this day, are still born with webbed hands and feet… _Ursilla’s Curse.”_

They all sat in silence for a moment, the only sounds came from a fussy little Julie who kept struggling weakly in Brian’s hold. Fighting herself into sleep.

“They didn’t really think you two were descended from mermaids, did they?” Freddie sounded incredulous and he had every right to be. It did sound fantastical and otherworldly, the two worlds were meant to be separate for a reason. It’s why John had chosen to raise his sister in the lesser of the two evils. The world that Julie could never really leave.

“I don’t know.”

Julie yawned, flashing her pink gums and tiny white teeth, as she cuddled closer to Brian’s enormous cloud of hair.

John watched his new guitarist’s face soften like melted chocolate, one hand coming up to cradle her tiny head. He’d be lucky if he ever got his little girl back at all with the way Brian was looking at her. His precious guitar times ten.

"Maybe."

  
~ ~ ~

  
_“Let my voice lead you this way_  
_I will not lead you astray_  
_Trust me as we reach the side_  
_Jumping out where men have died…”_

  
~ ~ ~

  
The boys spent the night at John’s place.

Roger and Freddie strewn onto his bed bonelessly, the blond’s fingers inadvertently curled into the edge of the fishing net that created a canopy over their heads. Fredde’s own head was buried in Roger’s soft tummy, his feet hovering above the ground, sticking out of the covers that always smelled a bit like the sea, no matter how many times John washed them. John himself, fell into a dreamless doze on the couch, trusting that Brian would put Julie to bed.

He did.

But only after singing to her.

Unprompted from John or the little girl herself, Bri sang a few words and a melody that he'd been toying with for many years.

The younger man cracked an eye to watch Brian sway in the moonlight that trickled in through the windows. Julie was asleep within minutes, as her minder sung in a surprisingly beautiful voice. Bri’s dulcet tones weren’t supernatural in the slightest, but they were still enough to lull both mers to sleep.

_“And the night followed day and the story tellers say: that the score brave souls inside, for many a lonely day sailed across the milky seas… Ne'er looked back, never feared, never cried…”_

She went down like a little doll, laying limp and loose-limbed in his hold. Or at least, she would’ve, if Bri had ever _put her down._

Instead he plopped down heavily in a nearby seat, probably only meaning to rest his eyes for a moment, and fell asleep with her on his chest, her tiny form rising and falling smoothly with each of his breaths. 

John watched it all and _wondered_ about the boys that they had ensnared without a song or a ship to run aground.

  
~ ~ ~

  
_“Ocean was your lover's name_  
_You had loved her all the same_  
_Now you'll always be together_  
_Sirens are so very clever.”_

  
_~ ~ ~_

_~ ~ ~_

_~ ~ ~_

 

 


	5. If Only

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I've been waiting for like 100 years for this stupid fireworks show to start, while staring at the pier for the past four hours. Hence... this thing. :) Not my favorite chapter, but I'll fix it later. :)
> 
> Something cool mentioned in this chapter is The Magic Roundabout, a children's show that aired before the BBC's nightly news in the '70s. Apparently Brian May actually watched it. Here's an episode from YouTube that aired in the '70s. Brian is the snail ;) Queen 3D also has some pictures of him having hand-painted the characters that came in cereal boxes. 
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3DcChXNyYQ
> 
> *Warning: there is some teasing about weight to illustrate John's different perspective on the world, please skip that portion if it triggers you.*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Features If Only from The Little Mermaid on Broadway. 
> 
> Also did ya'll know that Halle Bailey is going to be our Ariel for the live action remake??? I am so fucking excited!!! Babes, have you heard this gal sing??? She's flawless!!! I am Q U A K I N G harder than the oatmeal, ya'll. 
> 
> But I digress... enjoy! :)

_“If only you could know_  
_The things I long to say_  
_If only I could tell you_  
_What I wish I could convey…”_

 

 

There was a reason that selkie and merrow stories always ended in tragedy.

In truth, they were more than just wicked tales of kidnapped brides and the eventual abandonment of young children.

The stories like his mother and father’s were sometimes _worse,_ the ones that masqueraded as happy tales at the beginning and yet ended in the same tragic way. Broken Aseops. 

That idea of loving someone more than yourself, more than who and what you were, that was something truly terrifying. And the idea of love becoming a gilded cage, of being ensnared by a rebellious heart, that was something equally as scary. _No one should have to change to be loved. In the same way that no one should have to be **locked away**  to be loved. _

John Deacon grew terrified of that sort of love when he was just a wee lad, holding his newborn sister in his arms and _knowing_ without knowing, that his mother was never coming back.

He had watched her sickening love _destroy her_ after his adoptive father died. He had watched her mockery of true love destroy the only family that he’d ever known.Her _love_ had stolen his freedom out from underneath him, it had both figuratively and literally _stolen his pelt._

His first and last taste of true autonomy, was in that moment when he wrapped his simple red fur _(so much more than what it seemed),_ around a tiny, caterwauling Julie. Giving it away, in the same way his mother had once handed her cap to a fisherman with red hair and kind eyes.

“Oi! _Dreamy Deaky,_ where did you go?”

John tore his eyes away from the Thames, writhing black and frothy as ever, rolling past the van’s grimy windows, as Roger waved a hand in front of his face.

There were black eyes in the water, familiar dark short snouts that bobbed up above the waves and just _watched them_ , watching demurely as their van went by, perhaps giving a short chase at the departure and following for a couple of yards, corkscrewing in the gentle laps at their hides.

“Nowhere,” He smiled, wistfully. “Just watching the seals.”

Julie was asleep in his lap, her curly redhead cradled in the crook of his elbow.

Sometimes, he wondered what the sea’s calling was like for her, or if she even felt anything at all. His own webbed fingers carded down her back, straightening out her little yellow sundress, one that Freddie had picked out to match the sunshine gold clips in her curls. _(Their singer saved all the baby clothes from his stall now, even if John told him how foolish that was, if only monetarily. But Freddie always waved him off with a: 'Nonsense, Deaky. Our daughter will only have the finest couture!')._

Suddenly, there were a pair of freckled bony elbows joining her in his hold, as his own Roger Taylor practically climbed into his lap.

If only to smash his face against the windowpane, peering through the glut and grime that London had bestowed upon the glass.

Julie awoke violently in the shuffle of too long many limbs, shaking out her head of fluff and rubbing at droopy eyes. But instead of crying out or complaining at the brusque change in her position, she merely hrumphed and buried her chubby cheeks into Roger’s side, cooing happily after a moment or two of scenting him.

All while John himself _scowled,_ despite the ever-present urge to smile around Roger, _(he'd been suddenly afflicted with it over the past couple of weeks. It was remarkably annoying)._

“Roger," His voice was soft, but terse. "You’re _crushing_ me.”

The blond cheekily waved his hand in the bassist’s face again, the dirty digits edging far too close to John’s mouth for comfort. “ _Shh, John!”_

The younger boy rolled his eyes as Roger continued surveying the area. “Where are the seals? I can’t see anything.”

_Because you aren’t wearing your glasses, Roger._

But he pouted in a way that made John’s heart turn to viscous goo. These boys were going to be the death of him one day, he was almost sure of it.

The long-suffering brunet looped a surprisingly muscled arm around both of the charges in his lap, hiking Julie up onto his shoulder and motioning towards the window again to catch Roger's attention.

 _“Look,_ you can see their eyes poking out of the water.” He lightly tapped on the glass.

Roger's larkspur eyes squinted, reminding John once again of the blond’s piss-poor eyesight, but then his round face brightened up considerably and he jutted his finger against the glass. “I can _see_ them!” Practically squealing with a boy's excitement. “There they are... Are they _following us?_ Look, Deaky! _Look!”_ His voice was so full of awe and wonder. 

John couldn’t help the way his own cheeks flushed with delight at the sound.

“I see them, Rog.”

“It’s bloody _brilliant_ , innit?” Flashing that little lemon shark smile of his, the freckles that summer brought out on his skin could have easily passed for _ampullae of lorenzini._

“Definitely.”

"Hm," A sulky Brian huffed from the driver’s seat, John had almost forgotten who was driving them home, deciding to grace them all with his expansive knowledge on the subject. “You two are just seeing things, the Thames was declared dead in 1957. There aren’t any seals in there, haven’t been for decades.” His tone was obliging, but pointedly tired. Their endless gigs and school on top of it, had really stressed out their guitarist. John could see it in his posture and his eyes. 

Freddie punctuated the end of Brian’s sentence with a throaty snore, having been sleeping soundly since the moment his head hit the seat. They’d all piled into the van to leave after their third gig that week and he’d gone limp. Poor Fred had just come off a double shift at Heathrow and his shared stall at Kensington Market with Roger. Their exhausted frontman needed all the rest that he could get and the blond in his lap wasn't much better. 

It often worried John, in the past few weeks of nonstop practicing and gigs, how little the boys actually _took care of themselves._

Roger scowled so hard that his pale nose wrinkled, shifting around in a thinly veiled attempt to crush John’s thighs. “Maybe it was dead in ’57, but it isn’t dead now.” Cue his own tired pout. “You don’t know _everything,_ Bri.”

That last sentence was grumbled as the blond crossed his arms across his chest, like the child he became when he was tired, peering out at the seals once more. “John saw ‘em too, and he knows everything about the ocean and shit.” Rog turned around to face him again, blue eyes questioning.

“That’s what you’re studying innit? Oceans and shit?”

“Marine biology and electrical engineering.” The younger boy absentmindedly corrected, still more concerned than the boys thought he ought to be.

Roger waved his hand as if to brush the complexities away. “Yeah, that stuff. So he knows more than _you,_ Bri.” Grinning ear-to-ear like the incurable little shit that he was.

Their aspiring astrophysicist only glowered in turn, flicking on his blinker with more force than was likely necessary. “Probably because John’s starting to hallucinate from the lack of proper blood flow. You’re _crushing him_ , Rog.”

The blond was instantly affronted, top lip curling up. _(He only did that when he was disgusted or upset)._ “Oi! I’m not too heavy! Right, John?”

“You’re fine.”

 _“See!”_ His smoky voice was turned insistent and his round cheeks flushed red.

Brian tsked. “Well, he’s not going to insult your weight to your face, Rog. John’s far too nice for that.”

“Fuck off, you tosser, I’m not _fat!”_

Then, barked in a similar but smaller voice, as he moved to get off John’s lap. “You’d tell me if I was too heavy, right John?”

Regardless of the younger man’s answer, the blond still slid off his thighs with an annoyed little sigh, looking almost _ashamed_. The lad did try his best to hide it though, as he pawed through his pockets looking for his fags.

_“Where the hell are my bloody cigs?”_

_“You can’t smoke in here, Rog.”_

_“Watch me.”_

It took a moment for John’s _pelagic_ brain to catch up to what the _mammalian_ issue really was.

But as soon as he did, the younger man stilled Roger with his free hand, the one that wasn’t holding Julie. When the blond paused, cigarette hanging from his lips, John promptly hiked him back up into his previous spot.

The older boy _yelped._

“Yes, I would tell you." John quickly assured, fighting the urge to grab Roger's face so they could lock gazes once more. "You're not fat, Roger… Nor would it ever  _matter_ if you were.” Insulation was very important to the creatures of the sea, if only for survival. John saw no beauty or allure in the pointed thinness of menfolk, not like the humans themselves seemed to. He just saw an easy and weak meal.

Roger wasn’t _weak,_ by any stretch of the imagination, so why should he _look_ like he was? What was the point in that?

The brunet had felt his heart clench at the off-beat and embarrassed tone of Roger’s voice, the touch of insecurity hidden there. His drummer should never _ever_ sound that way, soft in the middle or not.

“Brian, don’t be a _berk_ and apologize to him. _Now.”_

Roger grinned, with all unhappiness forgotten, as he stuck out his little pink tongue. Bri rolled his warm brown eyes, grumbling to himself all the while. “And both of you better be quiet or you’ll wake Freddie. And he doesn’t get enough sleep as it is.” None of his boys did.

The drummer shook his head, looking over at Julie dozing on John's shoulder, before stealing her away. Taking her into his own arms with a touch of fondness. Lemon sharks were viviparous, meaning they gave birth to live young. “Ha, you really are a _dad_ , Deaky.” As if they’d expected anything less from him.

“But I’m not.”

He needed to tell them sometime, _(he should have told them that first night)._

“What do you mean?” Roger’s yellow eyebrows furrowed so deeply that they met in the middle. “You’re _Julie’s._ ” Even Brian peeked at him in confusion, through the rearview mirror.

“I’m not though.” He shook his head, letting his soft, forever-damp hair fall around his otherworldly green eyes. Roger was bouncing little Julie in the crook of his arm, it was enough to drag John’s attention away from those concerned blue eyes. She giggled like a wild thing his girl, and snuggled as close as she could to their drummer and his callused hands. “She’s my _little sister,_ not my _daughter._ But I’ve been looking after her for almost all her life so, in a way… I suppose she _is.”_

He was all that Julie had ever known.

She would never know the merrow who had born her, or the fisherman who had fathered her. John was all she had.

Her entire history would end and begin with him. _(And she would never know the truth of her own origins, not if John could help it)._

When John turned back to the water, he saw a familiar flash of red disappearing beneath the waves.

His too-bright green eyes snapped over to Roger, wondering if the blond had seen the same inhuman thing peeking out from below. But he was still staring at John. Those pacific eyes turned soft and heavy with an undue sympathy, one that the bassist hadn’t expected.

“John, what happened to your—?”

 _“Roger, leave it.”_ Brian’s voice cut through the air between them as easily as if he'd used a serrated blade, abrupt enough to make John pause. He wasn’t sure why Brian had been so brusque and sharp, until he tasted the salt of his own tears in his mouth. _Oh_.

_Why was he crying? He hadn’t cried properly for ages._

He supposed that biologically, it was the selkie and seal in him, as merrow didn’t often cry.

John’s pale webbed hands were trembling outside of his control, as he scooped up Julie. Burying his damp face in her hair for comfort's sake, and letting out a few ragged breaths as her little hands twirled into his own dark locks.

“Wanee?”

She questioned, her innocence alight in every syllable and his heart throbbed inside his chest.

That was when a pair of surprisingly gentle arms dotted in wisps of honey blond hair, wrapped around him and Julie, holding them close. John could have fought their imposing touch or shoved them off. He could have easily bared his sharp teeth, like the monstrous sea creature he was. Instead, he sniffled, rather pathetically, and sunk into Roger’s forgiving embrace. His head fell forwards onto that freckled shoulder, his lips parted as he panted heavily into the warm skin, and _he wept._

“I’m sorry, Deaky. I’m so sorry… for _everything.”_

John grunted into his shoulder, still trying to steady his own breathing.

Roger smelled like the chippie fare he’d had for dinner, sweat and a dash of something fruity.

They stayed like that for a while,only  _breathing in_  the night air. 

The world was so still around them, that John could almost hear the crash of waves from his past life, before...

“Do you want to go home and watch Brian on _The Magic Roundabout?”_

The complete non sequitur made John snort a snotty laugh that fractured the stillness, and Roger eagerly echoed it. Especially when he saw the tears drying up in the younger’s eyes. All while their own Brian sighed his displeasure, the gesture was notably fond however and there was an uncharacteristic smile twitching to life on his lips. _The Magic Roundabout_ was a children’s show that they watched _‘for Julie’_ and that aired just before the nightly news on the BBC.

 _The Magic Roundabout_ ’s Brian was a little snail with a painted red shell, one that was comically _small_ when compared to the rest of the characters and always appeared at the most impromptu times. Every time he would pop up on the telly screen, all three of the other bandmates would shriek and laugh hysterically, while their own exasperated and very human Brian would try to smother Roger with one of Freddie’s decorative throw pillows.

_(The ones that had strangely migrated onto John's own couch)._

  
~ ~ ~

  
_“It's in my ev'ry glance_  
_My heart's an open book_  
_You'd see it all at once_  
_If only you would look…”_

  
~ ~ ~

  
John loved to stand in the rain.

Whether it be the light sprinkling pitter-patter of a spring shower or the torrential downpours that London was so prone to, John would forever stand outside in his boxers and an oversized shirt, eyes closed and arms outstretched to feel the sea once again. Even in the biting wind and supposed chills, that he never felt.

He often did the same thing as a boy, standing on the cliffs near to where he and his mother had first come from the water.

The rain hitting the sea was something truly peculiar to watch. They were identical twin sisters, the rain and the sea. Both came in waves, crashing together and rolling apart. John would close his eyes and he would be dancing through the raindrops, hovering in that space between the sea and the sky, just before the waves collided once more. The dirt around his feet would turn into a molten silver puddle of sea and sky, and he would push down, his toes would squelch apart, his webs exposed in the murky rippled surface.

No one in the village ever paid any mind to the strange bairn, who so often stood on the precipice of the cliff face, dancing in the tempests that afflicted the islands now and then. He was already so odd, that very little phased his neighbors anymore.

It was only when John heard the trudge of heavy work boots and saw a worried face illuminated by the stripes of lightning across the sky, that he would turn away from the sea and open up his arms, obediently. His father would always be there to wrap him up in a heavy wharfman’s rubber jacket, one that dwarfed his lithe frame, and carry him home to warm him up. Whispering words of love on the trek, words that were lost in the whirling vortices of deluge and the whipping gusts of wind.

_“John!”_

Present day John turned, half-expecting to see his father stumbling out of the haze towards him, he even raised up his arms on reflex, like he used to as a child. Then he remembered London, and that he was standing outside in the freezing rain in just his undershirt and boxers, his heavy cotton socks soaked through. The face that was illuminated by the lightning wasn’t round either, it was angular and looked so odd with its usual curly poof turned into wet straight locks that stuck to its cheeks. The concern was the same though.

"Thank _God_ , John! _Come with me!"_

Brian was shivering something fierce, as he wrapped his arms around John’s much smaller body and pulled them towards the house, away from the violent wind that was only a few mphs away from tropical storm ferocity. Poor Brian himself was so slight, John was half-afraid he’d blow away in a sudden unexpected gust.

Two other sets of worried arms joined in the huddle, as the pair finally reached the porch.

Freddie and Roger dragged them both inside like a pair of bedraggled cats, all without a second’s fuss.

Well, not until they were forcibly bundled onto the couch, and hidden under at least a dozen coats and shirts to serve as blankets.

That's when John found his head being attacked by a raspy tea-towel.

“Ow.” He whimpered, which only seemed to intensify Freddie’s angry rubbing, like a mother cat trying to wash her kitten.

“What on earth were you thinking, John!?” He scolded, sounding an awful lot like Arthur Deacon as he did so. “It’s a bloody _maelstrom_ outside and you decide to go _stand in it?_ Without even a proper coat and trousers?” Clearly Freddie had forgotten what John was wearing the night they met. A black-nailed and tan hand reached a little lower, and the bloke all but shrieked his malcontent. “Your socks are _sodden_. John, you’re going to get _pneumonia_ , you crazy man. You’ll catch your _fucking death!”_ Freddie wasn’t even reaching his usual levels of dramatic flare, he seemed legitimately scared. “Up, up, up, you’re going to take a hot bath, _right now!”_

Freddie was swatting him on the bum with his own tea-towel and John gave an affronted little snort. The merrow’s eyes were really on Brian, who was receiving much of the same treatment from Roger. But who looked very pale aside from two dots of ruddy color on his cheeks, and who was still shivering despite the heat in the flat.

John was resolute. “No. Brian should go first.”

“Brian will be _fine_ , dear.” Freddie tsked, arms crossed. The curly-haired man looked up droopily, at the sound of his name. “You must have been out in that deluge for _ages,_ Brian was only out there for a few minutes.” Brian echoed the sentiment with a little nod of his own, snuggling deeper into his thin blanket, one of the few things that John kept around for normalcy’s sake. He’d never actually used the scratchy afghan for its intended purpose and frankly, it didn’t seem all that great at it.

“Brian needs to go first.” John grunted, crossing his own arms and staring down Freddie with all the sullenness that he could muster. Which wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things.

“Deaky, you should just  _go_.” Roger sighed, already looking sick of the fight that was brewing as he fussed over their Mayflower, so John acquiesced.

But not before trudging over and wrapping his webbed hand around Brian’s own frigid digits, resisting the urge to blow on them and warm them.

“I will, _with Brian._ We’ll just bathe together.”

Problem solved.

John smiled, but Brian looked even whiter than before, worse than his usual bleached bone. The merrow could see all the veins popping beneath his friend's cold papery skin and a thrill of icy spiked fear twirled and tied tight around his sea-bound heart. _“Together?”_ The guitarist rasped and John nodded, confused at his stricken reaction. The younger man used to bathe with his mother and father sometimes, and he often swam with seals and the other creatures in small tide pools. Why was warming together any different? Pods warmed together all the time, it was a form of bonding. _('They aren't your pod, John.' The spiteful little voice inside his head reminded him, the voice that was very very human)._

“John, I can’t. We’re two blokes, it’s  _odd.”_

“Oh.” John felt the thread twist even tighter. “I’m… _odd_ then?”

Brian’s bronze eyes widened and he was frantically shaking his head, guilt painted across his elfin features. “No! _No!_ John, you aren’t odd. It’s just… I _can’t_ , alright?”

“Because we’re two blokes?”

Brian bit his lip and looked away, pulling that godforsaken blanket closer to him and letting his eyes fall downcast. As if trying to disguise himself like a playful cuttlefish, the chameleon of the seas. Cuttlefish could grow as large as four feet long, and yet still hide as well as they could at barely eight inches. Fluffing up their gelatinous bodies to control their own buoyancy and using hypnotic colorful wavelengths to hunt for their dazzled prey. They were just as smart as their octopus cousins, but instead of always exercising that big brain of theirs, they often preferred to hide it away. As if scared of truly being _seen._ “Something like that.”

John nodded. “Okay.”

The brunet charged off into his bedroom before he could lose courage, his stormy heartbeat was instantly whooshing in his ears, telling him to turn back.

 _But when was the last time he had heeded the call of his heart?_ The merrow gently tugged his red pelt off the back of Julie’s currach cradle, studded with shells, moving as delicately as he could so that he wouldn’t wake her. She only rolled over at the quick displacement of air, sucking on her closed fist. One of her blue socks was missing, so John made sure to tuck both of her tiny freckled feet underneath the blankets.

In the same way, he painstakingly tucked his pelt around Brian's trembling form.

Smoothing out every corner and folding it over gently, to make sure the spindly boy would be as warm as possible.

John tossed aside the thin blanket from before, with a look of pure and utter distain, as he pried off Brian’s own soaking wet socks and tucked those long bony feet underneath the pelt as well, manhandling all of his charge's wayward limbs beneath.

The soaked curls were finally starting to bounce back after Roger’s tender ministrations.

Roger who was also looking at the pelt as though it were something completely _foreign_ to him, running his sensitive fingers up and down the strange surface.

“This feels so _real_  and _warm, as if... as if it's alive._ ” 

John merely shrugged his shoulders quietly, certain that Roger would brush it off, as he went to take the hot bath that Dr. Freddie had ordered _(if only to stop the scathing glares being sent his way)_. Despite being relieved of his burden, John suddenly felt like he was a thousand pounds heavier.

The bassist heard all of them attempting to cram underneath the pelt as soon as he was out of sight.

When the ocean child was sitting in the water, he slid _down down down_ until his face was blessedly covered and he could breathe in once more. Salt or no salt.

He’d asked his mother once, why she’d given her pearly cap away to a fisherman. One who didn’t understand the world below, who didn’t understand what they’d be giving up for him.

She had simply kissed John’s forehead and pointed out on the horizon, to where Arthur’s boat bobbed gently in the waves. The wood was painted the same chalky blue color as their cottage, so that when they looked out onto the water, they could see that he was still safe out there. That he was coming home to them.

_“Tá grá agam dó, a leanbh.”_

_I love him, a leanbh._

And that was enough to doom them both. 

  
~ ~ ~

  
_“If only you could glimpse_  
_The feeling that I feel_  
_If only you would notice_  
_What I'm dying to reveal…_

 _All my secrets, you would learn them_  
_All my longings, you'd return them_  
_Then the silence would be broken_

_Not a word would need be spoken.”_

  
~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~

 

 


	6. The Maiden and The Selkie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one's so short, dears!! Wrote this during a study break. ;P Thank you so much for sticking with me this long and if you have any questions, hit me up on tumblr @waywardrunawaycherryblossom. :) <333333
> 
> Enjoy!!! 
> 
> Haha, plot. What is editing?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Features The Maiden and the Selkie by Heather Dale. :)

_“Once a fair and handsome Seal Lord_  
_Lay his foot upon the sand_  
_For to woo the Fisher's daughter_  
_And to claim her marriage hand_

 _'I have come in from the ocean_  
_I have come in from the sea_  
_And I'll not go to the waves, love,_  
_Lest ye come along with me.'”_  
   
 

  
John had been walking along the crisp briny shoreline just outside their cottage home, as he watched his father go out to sea _that_ morning.

The youth, with his long windswept dark locks stuck to his forehead and overalls grown too-short at the cuffs, collected his breakfast of fresh meaty oysters from wedged between the rocks. Fat grey ones that he’d crack open with his canines, sipping at their thick natural liquor as he watched the day’s catch come in.

They had embraced briefly, before his father left.

John’s bottle green eyes had closed in loving familiarity, as he scented the broader man on his tiptoes. There was dew clinging to his own misty dark lashes, as red wisps of his father’s loose curls tickled the inside of his nose.

He’d pressed a burlap sack of fresh oysters into the fisherman’s burly arms. Each of them was as compact and heavy as a broad stone, that was how John knew they were ready. _The Roan Inish_ had bobbed in the waves nearby, awaiting its wayward lover. So John had let him go.

His mother was too close to bearing Julie for fishing anymore, and his father had insisted that one of them had to be with her at all times.

So John let him go.

He would be the one who lived to regret it.

Sobbing as he knelt in the foamy waters of the sea, the tide coming up to lap at his knees, as if to soothe the ache that always burned there. A newborn Julie held in his arms, sleeping with her little face upturned towards the sky. John’s untamable dark hair was matted about his head, as he contemplated following his mother _down down down_ into the sea.

Perhaps he would even leave his pelt behind and let the sea swallow them both.

_(He would never call her Muirín, in the same way he couldn’t call himself Eoin. He couldn’t._

_Her name would be Julie. Soft, beautiful, fair. She would be Julie. Not Muirín._

_Julie was a soft and fair human child._

_For God was not Gracious and Muirín was born from the sea)._

  
~ ~ ~

  
_“‘Lord, long have I loved you_  
_As a Selkie on the foam_  
_I would gladly go and wed ye_  
_And be lady of your home_  
_But I cannot go into the ocean_  
_I cannot go into the sea_  
_I would drown beneath the waves, love,_  
_If I went along with thee.”_

  
~ ~ ~

  
Three tempests slowly moved into John’s place, one by one.

While not being enormous, his home was certainly big enough to accommodate all of them. John strung up a few more netted hammocks for himself and replaced his stiff couch with one that pulled out into a proper bed.

But soon still found himself tripping over fancy thin paper walls, ones that Freddie had erected _(‘they’re privacy partitions, dear!’)_ , piles and piles of old stereo-photographs, that were also soon hung on the walls in a sort of odd collage by Brian _(‘I do collect them, Deaky… if that’s alright.’ It always was, John could forbid Brian nothing),_ and Roger's sprawl of flashy clothes as far as the eye could see _(‘I’m high maintenance, Deaks. You know that.’),_ the lime green boxers in the fridge were a stretch, but John acquiesced.

They gave him a million reasons _why._

For Julie.

For the band.

For money.

For time.

But John didn’t care.

He just wondered how he had never noticed the quietness and monotony of his own life.

Well, the life he’d had _before_ three rogue waves had thrown it into irreparable disarray.

Rogue waves were an oceanic phenomenon that not many understood. Mostly because they weren’t meant to be.

They were waves that didn’t follow any set pattern, other than the fact that they tended to come in threes, enormous freak surface waves that were at least twice the significant wave height of any surrounding them. Waves that only existed to allow the ocean to reclaim what she desired. To reclaim what she had to, in order to provide for her children.

Humans used to think that rogue waves were myths, as no one ever survived to tell the tale, not before the existence of double hulled ships anyway. And many scientists still thought they were, nothing more than ghost stories, ones that mariners told to scare one another.

But John never wrote off such tales as myth or superstition. He had no right… after all, he himself was a creature from one of those folktales.

Alas, having a house full of humans also meant that his less than ordinary urges were often put on the back burner. Meaning, if he wanted to transform and curl up under the bathtub tap for hours, breathing in the water that he had dumped at least a pound of salt into, it would have to be at two am when everyone else was asleep.

When he could grab hold of the porcelain tub with both webbed scaly hands and shove himself beneath the water, until his mostly ornamental gills sprang open, to siphon oxygen from the water instead of the air. His mammalian lungs going dormant as the double-pump system of his shoddy gill ventilation took over, similar to that found in teleost fish.

He felt secure and safe in there, floating like bulky flotsam and watching bubbles climb to the surface when he looked up.

The light above the tub was almost indistinguishable from the sun as it was milkily painted across the water’s surface.

It was a cold parody of being home again, but it was enough to keep him going.

Even as his fins brushed the tile and his thick muscled tail folded over the edge. It ached at the position, as there was no natural bend in it. 

He often found it funny the way humans portrayed mermaids, beautiful maidens sitting on rocks with a tail bent as though they had knees.

_They didn’t._

John’s entire cerise tail was a bit like bamboo, flexible and he could bend it at any point he wished. But it wasn’t a joint, it couldn't bend flat and sharp, not without pain. And not unless he contorted his body, the way he was now, just to fit.

The tail itself was pure muscle all the way down, the same way his fluke was malleable. He could change its stiffness on command by altering the tension in the tendons of his tail. It was how his kind could swim so fast, a stiffer fluke meant more control and pushing power in the water.

He let his mind drift as he floated, remembering the days when he and his mother would follow his father out to sea, listing his boat this way and that with their tails. Until the laughing fisherman peeked around the side of _The Roan Inish_ and saw them beaming cheekily up at him. He would get down on his knees and extend a hand, that red sea-sticky hair clumping up on his forehead as he grinned down at them. Their _Jolly Sailor Bold._

John would always remember the way Arthur had reached down to hold him, time and time again, cradling him close, once he was pulled free from the sea. Pressing their faces together for John to scent him, spinning him around in a little jig as the boat bobbed on the waves and he squealed with joy.

The simple fisherman had loved his otherworldly son. His great heart had possessed the capability for the most beautiful sort of love, the love for one’s child.

John could safely say, that in all his early years, he had never wanted for that love.

The merrow _felt_ the frantic booming knocks on the bathroom door, long before he _heard_ them.

They reverberated across the floor of the tub, with its curved lion’s feet and cast iron bottom. His sheathed aquatic eyes shot open in shock and his dark head broke the surface with a muted cry, his neglected lungs taking in a crisp breath at long last. The knocks were suddenly deafening as his ears equalized with a relieved pop.

“Deaky!?” Brian’s voice was breathy and uncomfortable, sounding like he was carrying something else… or someone else, and it was winding him. “Deaks, are you in there? I had to go pick up Rog and Fred from the bar.” There was another shuffle outside the door as a more sluggish bang sounded and a warbled noise like someone was humming show-tunes. “Can you help? Rog’s been sick on himself and Fred’s got to wee.”

 _“Wee wee weeee!”_ He could hear a sodden Freddie trill in an off-key falsetto, one that grated on his sore human eardrums like no other. Brian seemed to share the sentiment with his own ensuing groan.

“They’re both plastered as all hell.” Didn't need to tell him twice. 

There was a second audible thump as a body collided with the door, or perhaps the wall nearby.

“John, can you hear me?! Are you _alright?”_

Alas, John couldn’t answer, he was currently heaving himself out of the water with both hands. Only to flop onto the floor like a limp fish, his tail thrashing about in the wet linoleum puddles that he'd just created, as he tried to change back. Shoving his thumbs beneath the notches where his tail began, to desperately try and wiggle the pelt free. Painful, wet, frustrated gasps were all the sounds he was capable of making during the shift, as he struggled to both dry himself off and become humanoid once more.

He also all but turned the bathroom upside down with his agonized thrashing, knocking everything from shampoo bottles to toothbrushes off the countertops, and getting tangled up in the fallen shower curtain to add insult to injury.

Once his second skin finally came loose into his hands, shimmery from the scales stuck haphazard in the fur and slick from the sea that forever clung to his skin, he was shoving it to the bottom of a nearby laundry bin. Hastily staggering about on his unsteady sea-legs over to the door, with nothing but the shower curtain tied about him to cover his nakedness.

Knowing full-well that the stubborn vestiges of his shift would linger long after his human form was set to rights.

But with worry overtaking the sensible portions of his brain, he flung open his arms as he unlocked the door.

Only to bodily catch a drunken dark-haired waif a second later.

A needy Freddie Mercury who buried his face into John’s sticky hair with a happy squeak, as the younger man waddled them both over to the nearby toilet seat, supporting most of his friend’s meager weight, so that poor Freddie could finally wee.

The stuck limpet didn’t seem to want to let go however, and John had to swallow back the urge to sing or at least hum a song for him, as he guided Freddie’s shaking hands to the edges of the cold counter to steady himself.

As a relieved looking Brian shuffled past them, with a trembling Roger in tow.

The blond looked _ghastly._

He was sweaty and far too pale, the color of the dehydrated coral sold in those awful tourist traps, chunky peach vomit coloring the front of his bare chest, with his pink nipples pebbled harder than river stones from the cold and his shirt as frivolously unbuttoned as usual. Brian was more or less carrying their limp blond drummer inside like an oversized doll, only to gingerly nestle him into the still-full tub from John’s bath.

The bassist internally winced at the pained whimper from the boy, that much salt was bound to be painful to human skin.

But least he was still dressed?

“The water’s so _bouncy_ …” He heard Roger mumble into Brian's chest, as the guitarist tried his best to extricate Roger from his painted-on jeans, that were now slick with granulated salty water.

“This is why we don’t drink when we’re _sick,_ Rog.” Brian tsked in a frustrated tone, that was thick with worry and exasperation. “Why didn’t you tell anyone that you weren’t feeling well?”

“Dunno. Tired.”

An annoyed Brian rolled his eyes so violently, that John thought they might roll out of his head. “Four pints later, and I wonder why?”

A tiny pink petulant tongue poking past his chapped lips was Roger’s only retort.

Aside from the sick groan when Brian began scrubbing at the vomit.

While John managed to finagle Freddie into relieving himself and then staying put, as he rubbed the glitter and sweat off the singer's face with a nearby hand-towel. The pointed ends dabbed with fresh water, as Fred cooed at his tender ministrations and snuggled closer. “Feels nice, Deaky.”

“Thanks, Fred.” Fondness leaking out through every word.

Those butterfly lashes bobbed a few more times as he pouted. “Why are you wearing the curtains?”

Crimson spread across the bassist’s too-human cheeks. _“Shush.”_ He pressed a finger to those round and supple lips to quiet the older man, his own thoughts quite near to getting lost in those honeyed dark eyes.

He forced himself to turn away.

“Bri?”

John watched as the curly-haired man’s head listed to the side, a surefire sign that he’d been heard. “I’ll watch them both if you want to get the pajamas from the bedroom?”

A tired Brian turned to him with a sleepy smile twitching in the corners of his mouth. “ _Three_ pairs, huh?”

John nodded with a sleepy smile of his own, as he slid down to take Brian’s spot next to Roger. If only to make sure that the blond didn’t slip under the water by accident. Though with it as salt-buoyant as it was now, that would have been a difficult feat to accomplish in tens.

He made sure that Freddie was safe, near to nodding off on the toilet seat in his sweaty boxers, but safe. Before John began by carding his fingers through the blond fluff of hair before him. Roger was far too warm to the touch, that and the soft snuffles of Freddie’s breathing, brought out a familiar possessive concern in the younger boy’s moruadh blood. The need to protect and soothe.

 _“'Lady, long have I loved you_  
_I would have you for my wife_  
_I will stay upon your shoreland_  
_Though it robs me of my life_  
_I will stay one night beside you_  
_Never go back to the sea_  
_I will stay and be thy husband_  
_Though it be the death of me.'”_

Roger hummed and shifted in the water, until his head was cradled on John’s prominent collarbone. In the same graceless way Freddie slipped off his toilet seat and onto his padded bum, inching over in an awkward little scoot, so that he could lay against John and splash about with the water as well.

“Tha’s a pretty song, Deaky.” Roger slurred, snuggled nice and tight.

“Holding out on us again, dear boy.” Freddie’s hand cupped his cheek, his thumb rubbing over John’s cheekbone and ear with a drunken smile.

Both of them safe, both of them of sound mind _(mostly)._

John didn’t dare draw a breath.

“You never told us you could sing, John.” Brian chimed from the door frame, a stack of warm pajamas in hand, he pressed the back of his hand against his mouth to disguise a yawn. “I put on some cocoa for us, after we put these two to bed.”

“Oh! But I’m not sleepy, Bri!”

Roger whined, as Freddie pouted and John quietly lost his mind.

  
~ ~ ~

  
_“'Lord, I cannot go and wed thee_  
_All to watch my lover die_  
_Since I'll not be left a widow_  
_I have a plan for us to try_  
_Let us speak with my grandmother_  
_Who has ever dwelt beside the sea_  
_She may know some trick or treasure_  
_That I may wed my fair Selkie.'”_

  
~ ~ ~

  
She didn’t have a name, the creature who loved Arthur Deacon, who gave him a son and bore him a daughter.

But he called her Lily.

After the waterlilies whose pads were the same color as her hair.

So she called herself Lily as well.

She didn’t bewitch him with her songs, she merely sliced open his nets with her teeth, as he laid waste far too close to a cove, where her kind tended to their young. Lily was a protector, in the same way her son would become one as well. Arthur showed her a kindness that she thought impossible from those above. When she tore open his nets time and time again, he simply remade them and moved away from the cove. But she kept tracking him down, kept approaching his boat. She wanted him. So she sang to him.

But he wasn’t called, he wasn’t swallowed up by the sea.

Her song didn’t call him in the way it called the others.

She was meant to bring him _down,_ instead the splendid youth with his boyhood smile and rakish eyes, brought her _up._

  
~ ~ ~

  
_“'Lord, I know not how to aid you_  
_You may never live on shore_  
_For your kind to live 'til dawning_  
_It has ne'er been seen before_  
_But my mother had a seal coat_  
_That she buried 'neath the tree_  
_And she told me that its wearer_  
_Would become a fair Selkie.”_

  
~ ~ ~

  
The baby she bore him was different than her first.

A tiny red shrunken thing that screamed in a way that made her ears ache. The hair upon its head was not Arthur’s ginger softness, the orange strands that she had spent years finding twisted in her mouth or laid upon her brush. The babe’s hair was the color of fire and beneath the waves, as red as blood. _One for the land and one for the sea._ Her boy, who had come upon the land with his dark hair and eyes that spoke of _Tir fo Thoinn,_ and learned to walk without knives that cut his every step. And her girl, who was born with fire for hair and pickled in the sea that left marks upon her skin.

_Her boy for the land._

_Her girl for the sea._

Lily followed her fisherman into the water and left her daughter in the care of her bound son.

_“When the time comes,” She whispered into the still air as the waters below swallowed her up once more. “Send her home to me.”_

Lily could not read the portents, nor could she truly see what lay beyond. But she did once, in her mind’s eye, see her daughter as a woman. A beautiful half-wild thing diving into the deep dark waters of the loch, her hand clasped with that of a young selkie.

In the same way, three pairs of hands would anchor her son to the land that lay solid beneath his feet, and take him farther and farther away from her.

  
~ ~ ~

  
_“Just before the stroke of midnight_  
_They have made it back to sea_  
_And she has donned the magic seal coat_  
_And become a maid Selkie_  
_Now they've gone into the ocean_  
_Hand in hand into the sea_  
_She has gone along_

_A fair seal bride for a Selkie.”_

  
~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~

 


	7. The Mariner's Revenge Song

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ooh, okay so this chapter does deal with some child abuse, spousal abuse, and implied murder of the abuser, so if that isn't your cup of tea, please turn back now :) 
> 
> Also sorry it's so short. :) Next chap will be longer :)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Features The Mariner's Revenge Song by the Decemberists and a quote from Merrow by Ananda Braxton-Smith.

_“We are two mariners_  
_Our ship's sole survivors_  
_In this belly of a whale_  
_It's ribs are ceiling beams_  
_It's guts are carpeting_  
_I guess we have some time to kill…”_

 

  
An eager, bright-eyed Roger held out John’s pasty for him as he took a bite from the middle, downing a mouthful of thinly sliced beef, potato, pepper and onion, with an appreciative hum.

It really was quite good.

Honestly though, with the loving lemon shark look Roger was giving him, he would have said it was wonderful regardless.

“Good, innit? I’m bloody rubbish in the kitchen, but every good Cornish boy knows how to make a pasty.”

Roger let go of John’s dinner long enough to grab one of his own. Taking an enormous bite, just so he wouldn’t have to answer his friend’s next question.

“Wasn’t Bri driving you home from uni later today?”

The blond grunted and then shrugged, his arms left bare so that John could see the soft downy blond hair that grew there, nearly translucent in the light. “Buggered off the classes, didn’t give a shit.” He tore off the rind of his pasty and passed it to an always-ravenous Julie, in small pieces so she wouldn’t choke. Her little hands were patting at Roger’s bicep with insurmountable joy. Trilling little: _“Roddy”_ s, her name for him that always made the drummer melt like a popsicle in the sun, as she did so.

Now John knew that wasn’t true, about the classes. They were doing femur dissections in his lab today and Roger had spent days talking about how excited he was to do a bone-cracking. There was no way he would have just buggered off, not when they were genuinely doing something worthwhile.

“Roger,” He moved to shift his pasty into one hand, in order to grab the drummer’s calloused digits with his own. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I told you already. Just didn’t give a shit.” He eyed John’s hand disapprovingly. “You’re meant to hold it on the crimped side.”

The bassist scowled, setting his pasty down on a nearby greasy paper plate as he crossed his arms. “Roger, talk to me.”

The stubborn blond merely leaned over to kiss Julie on the forehead, before heading outside onto the patio, a pack of Marlboros bulging out of his trouser pocket. A signal for not wanting to talk.

John sighed, his iridescent pelagic eyes following the drummer out the door with undisguised worry.

Roger’s clenched fists were trembling.

  
~

  
_“You may not remember me_  
_I was a child of three_  
_And you, a lad of eighteen_  
_But, I remember you_  
_And I will relate to you_  
_How our histories interweave…”_

  
~

  
In the end, John asked Brian.

He and Roger had been friends for ages, so if anyone understood the idiosyncrasies that made up the soft boy that they all loved, then it was likely their guitarist.

But once the query had passed John’s lips however, halfway through bath-time with Julie, he watched as storm clouds passed over Brian’s usually sensitive and soft countenance, like a hurricane rolling in from the coast. The curly-haired man’s gentle hands paused from where he was rubbing no-tears shampoo and conditioner into Julie’s red tangles. The little imp was wholly unbothered by the end of her loving uncle’s ministrations, as she splashed about in the tub. A water baby through and through, her little toes forming the crests of waves as she kicked her chubby legs up and down.

“Roger is just being a stubborn _twat,_ as usual.” The ferocity of the words were belied by the worry that striated through them. Brian looked frightened beneath the anger.

John used an empty coffee mug to wash the soap from his surrogate daughter’s hair, raising a single dark eyebrow to prompt the older to continue. But honestly, he needn’t have bothered. Their guitarist was about to go on a tirade, come hell or high water.

“He gets like this every time we get a gig in Cornwall. All I bloody asked him, was if he wanted to visit his parents while we were there. Because it’s so close to where he grew up. But every time I so much as mention them, he just shuts us out, or picks petty fights and won’t give anyone a straight answer.” Brian dried his hands with a nearby towel hemmed with breeching dolphins. “He buggered off those classes because he didn’t want to see me. I’m sure of it. As if he can just avoid the situation by not talking to anyone about it.”

Julie wiggled closer, sensing her uncle’s dismay, until she was pressing her chubby cheek against Brian’s bony elbow, the only thing she could reach.

The guitarist jumped at the sudden intrusive touch, but softened soon enough, as he bent down over the rim of the tub and scooped her up, a fussy wet sluice of a thing. He quickly wrapped her up in a fuzzy towel. As John attacked her dripping hair with another.

The toddler whined all the while, trying to bat their loving hands away.

“I’m worried about him, Deaky.” Brian’s eyes were dower enough to hold all the sadness and grief in the world. “He’s _hurting_ and he won’t let us help…”

That gentle melodic voice was turned into little more than a whisper.

The merrow leaned close enough to wrap a strong and sure arm around that narrow waist. Holding both Brian and Julie in his arms at once, breathing in the honeyed scents that intermingled and made his heart sing like a conch shell.

“We’ll make sure he’s alright, Bri. We will.”

John wasn’t going to let anything happen to his pod.

  
~

  
_“At the time you were_  
_A rake and a roustabout_  
_Spending all your money_  
_On the whores and hounds_

 _You had a charming air_  
_All cheap and debonair_  
_My widowed mother found so sweet…”_

  
~

  
Cornwall was beautiful.

Full of grassy knolls, sloping cliffs of jagged stone, waters of briny blue and waves that crested high enough to spray their windows with foam from the road. The sand was golden and looked comfortingly warm. It was reminiscent of his own home in Ireland and Celtic sea childhood, both at land and sea. Lichen-covered surf-worn rocks soothed his fingertips and led back out to sea like a beacon. The wind even carried with it, the promises of old. The Cornish sea was where his kind had often swum over the centuries, buoyed between the isles with a calling that never quite ceased.

The young bassist was dressed in a salmon-pink shirt, a button-up borrowed from Brian, with tiny black nylon shorts from Freddie and worn sandals on his feet. But in his heart he was under the waves, flitting about in the froth with a tail the color of blood.

While by contrast, Roger was sullen the whole drive there. Spending the majority of his time either looking out the window, complaining or dragging his feet every time they stopped for a rest or a wee.

Freddie tried his best to lift the blond’s wayward spirits by discussing their setlist _(one of Roger’s favorite things to argue about),_ but their drummer was uncharacteristically quiet. Too quiet. John tried to assist with a quip or two of his own, coaxing Roger to participate, as Brian drove them by the coast with a few snide remarks of his own and a sleepy Julie napping between them.

Yet, he didn’t rise to the bait. All Roger did was toy with the ends of his blond mop, silent, as they grew nearer and nearer to Truro.

John didn’t even notice that the blond was crying, _(so such was his pointed silence),_ until Julie started to fuss about, kicking her legs and reaching out towards their seat-mate in desperation. Her plaintive whining had John’s attention in an instant and her grabby hands towards Roger had the bassist’s brows furrowed with worry, following her gaze. Especially once he saw the tears glittering on those familiar round cheeks.

“Stop the car!” John snapped, his voice taking on a frightful edge as Roger’s crystalline eyes looked over in shock. “Pull over, Brian! _Now!”_

Then abject shame colored those damp cheeks as the blond realized just why John was urging Brian to pull over. He started to even cry harder, the silence punctuated by rough little gasps. Every stifled sob made the merrow’s feral side scream louder in his head, urging him to seek out the threat. Instinctually, John was both a predator and very protective of his family. Those two things could be very frightening when combined together.

Freddie was trying to twist around in his seat to see what was wrong, eyes bloated with worry. “Deaky, dear? What’s wrong? Are you alright? Do you feel ill? Is it Julie?”

The questions were coming too fast to process, let alone answer, and all the bassist could do was reach out towards Roger, his main concern.

But the older boy just kept inching away from the webbed hand that sought him out, as his chest bobbed up and down with choked-off cries.

“Roger’s crying.”

John blurted out tactlessly, sounding angry instead of worried. His voice was low, gravelly and threatening, without meaning to be. He needed to reach Roger, yet the boy kept moving away.

The blond started sobbing audibly, shaking his head as he pressed his hands like a vice against his lips. His protests were turned into half choked wails as he gasped around them. “S-Stop! De… I-I’m _no-o-ot.”_ The boy’s rapid breathing had turned nauseating and his sobs near-indecipherable as he turned the same ruddy shade as an overripe tomato.

Julie echoed his distressed cries with several of her own, uncomprehending of the situation, and only wanting to be held. Concern and worry reducing the tiny tot to tears.

“Roddy!” She cried. “Roddy, _up!”_ Reaching for him.

Which only made Roger sob harder, covering his face with his arms in vain, to hide from all of them.

“Roger, _breathe in and out.”_ Brian coached gently from the front-seat, forcing his voice to stay calm as he pulled them over to the bumpy shoulder of the road.

“I-I-I can’t.” Their half-suffocated drummer moaned, but the older boy was steadfast. “Yes, you can. _In and out. In and out.”_

Roger only coughed bitterly and sobbed.

The moment the car was even close to unmoving, John was out of there, like he was on a hunt.

He rolled out of his open door and onto his hands and knees, shoving himself up in a dead-sprint, to throw open Roger’s side door and embrace the blond.

All with a speed that should have been impossible for a human. But no one was asking any existential questions right about then.

John used even more strength, that he shouldn’t have possessed, to lift Roger out of his seat, cradling him with the same ease that John did Julie. Pressing his lips into the sweaty pale yellow locks before him.

Roger clung to him tight like a limpet, which was not completely out of character for him, but the buckets of salty tears certainly were. A sober Roger would never be sobbing on John’s shoulder on the verge of hysterics or allow himself to be rocked and cradled like a baby. But that’s exactly what was happening now, only John had to physically pry Roger’s hands away from his nose and mouth lest he accidentally smother himself, while trying to keep the sobs at bay.

“It’s alright, Rog. Let it out, it’s alright.” _We’re here._

John could feel his heart physically breaking inside his chest, the pieces only held together from sheer fear and worry.

Every tear was bloody sacrilegious.  
  
Their darling was inconsolable for what felt like hours.

Even Freddie’s soft nothings and croons of familiar Queen melodies could not lift his spirits. Nor could Brian’s space ramblings or the soft circles rubbed between his shoulder blades by steady hands. Not even Julie’s wet kisses from Freddie’s arms. _Nothing._

Roger wept and wept.

The salty tears stung John’s flesh as they fell, and he regretted every instance that he had craved the feeling of saltwater on his skin once more. Not like this, never like this.

The best they could do was wrap their arms around each other, securing Roger in the middle. Letting him cry and cry until he couldn’t anymore. His cheek was practically stuck to John’s shoulder with dried tears, those rough gasps turned into soft pants, and hiccuping wheezes. Eventually he did calm however, face pointed out towards the sea, secure in the fact that they were never letting him go. Roger’s soft pale legs were wrapped loosely around John’s waist, mainly held there by the younger’s hands. None of them noticed that the bassist never seemed to tire.

“My father used to bring us here.”

It was the first thing Roger had said for what seemed like hours. They were just relieved to hear his voice again.

“My sister and I, when we were small.”

A hand slowly patted at John’s back, Roger’s limp little hand. “You’re a good Dad, Deaky. Better than mine ever was. You love her.” That hand reached up to scoop John’s chin, trembling all the while. _“You love her.”_ Said as if reminding himself, allowing their eyes to meet.

“I love you too, Roger.” John said it on reflex now, his heart was throbbing.

The blond shook his head with a sad smile, pressed into all of them like the most precious thing in the world, fresh tears dripping down his cheeks. “You shouldn’t say that.”

“Well fuck it, darling.” Freddie was crying as well, crying as he held onto all of them for all he was worth. “Because we _do.”_

“We really do.” Brian chimed in, even if he didn’t really have to say the words.

Not when they could all see his feelings in his eyes.

  
~

  
_“And so she took you in_  
_Her sheets still warm with him_  
_Now filled with filth and foul disease_  
_As time wore on you proved_  
_A debt-ridden drunken mess_  
_Leaving my mother_  
_A poor consumptive wretch…”_

  
~

  
John was something _different._

He was no merrow, not wholly anyway. Nor was he wholly selke with his betwixt eyes and form.

John Deacon, despite his countenance and upbringing, was not quite human either.

He had no qualms with slipping out of bed that night, at a little inn in Truro near the old gothic cathedral in the center of town. Julie was sleeping as soundly as ever. As were Freddie, Brian and Roger, all wrapped up together protectively. Roger had told them many things that night. _Many many things._

Things that harkened back to John’s true nature. His more instinctual responses to threats and revenge.

The creature slipped away in the dead of night and walked to a little house on the outskirts of town, near the sea. Where a battered woman and her girl-child slept and lived in fear of a violent man.

Said man soon wandered outside in a drunken stupor, following the call of something far older than he.

He wasn’t alone out there, in the howling wind that chilled his skin and whipped around the little blond hair that remained atop his head. He was being followed by something very old and very angry. Something very vengeful.

It was said that male merrow would capture the souls of sailors and trap them in jars below the sea.

But John was not a merrow, not wholly.

He was not so merciful.

The local fishermen who dragged what remained of the body from the water were perplexed.

The bites resembled that of _lemon sharks,_ feasting upon the violent man’s flesh.

Yet the only lemon shark in Britain slept soundly in John’s arms that night.

_Strange, wasn't it?_

  
~

  
_“Then, one day in spring_  
_My dear sweet mother died_  
_But, before she did_  
_I took her hand as she, dying, cried:_

 _"Find him, find him_  
_Tie him to a pole and break_  
_His fingers to splinters_  
_Drag him to a hole until he_  
_Wakes up naked_  
_Clawing at the ceiling_  
_Of his grave…”’_

  
~

  
John met Roger’s mother, a beautiful woman with cornsilk blond hair threaded with white and a fluffy blue skirt hemmed off around her knees, at the funeral where nobody cried.

She tsked at Roger about combing his hair properly, fussed at Brian that he was far too skinny, and commended Freddie on his excellent table manners. John, she spoke to later in the day, after many well-wishers, not knowing any better, had come to pay their respects. She brought him a piece of a pie that some kindly neighbor had left, as he watched his bandmates frolic on the beach, only feet away from the home.

“Thank you.”

She whispered and it carried for a moment on the breeze.

“For what?”

Winifred Taylor leaned over to press a kiss to John’s temple. She walked away, after waving to her son on the beach, running around in the waves with Julie on his shoulders, and left John the generous slice of meringue pie.

It tasted sweet and whipped on his tongue.

As light as the clouds in the sky that day.

  
~

  
_“It gives my eye great joy_  
_To see your eyes fill with fear_  
_To lean in close_  
_And I will whisper_  
_The last words you'll hear…”_

  
~

  
“Roggie, did you _see_ that?”

Clare Taylor, fourteen years old in an ill-fitting black dress, with golden hair that was cut shorter than her brother’s and already curling up in all directions from the sticky sea spray. She stood as still as could be and stared down at the water.

“What?” Roger called back, trying to keep Julie from eating the sand out of her bucket. “No, what is it?”

The teenager opened and closed her mouth for a moment, as if debating on what to say. Before she just shook her head, still looking down at the water.

“Nothing.”

Watching the glittering red tail disappear below.

  
~

  
_“She’s not your mother. She’s not a woman; she’s not even human. From the moment she went over, we lost her just as surely as if she’d died. They do not live for our benefit. They belong to Themselves.”_

  
~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~

 

 


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